Social Disabilities

Three months into her pregnancy with her first child, Hilary Yancey received a phone call that changed everything. As she learned the diagnosis - cleft lip and palate, a missing right eye, possible breathing complications - Hilary began to pray in earnest. Even in the midst of these findings, she prayed that God would heal her son. God could do a miracle unlike anything she had seen. Only when Hilary held her baby, Jack, in her arms for the first time did she realize God had given her something drastically different than what she had demanded.

David Aguilar was born missing part of one arm, a small detail that seemed to define his life and limit people’s ideas of who he was and who he could be. But in this funny and heartfelt memoir, David proves that he can throw out the rulebook and people’s expectations and maybe even make a difference in the world—and all with a sense of humor.

Rising Tide Car Wash in Parkland, Florida, isn’t average in any way. When Tom D’Eri and his father John bought the location in 2013, it was struggling. Now it’s one of the highest-volume washes in Florida. Its employee retention rate is five times that of its competitors. It has spun off into two additional locations that have been immediately successful, and the business is absurdly profitable.

It's the summer of 1970. Seventeen-year-old Jean has cerebral palsy, but she's always believed she's just the same as everyone else. She's never really known another disabled person before she arrives at Camp Courage. As Jean joins a community unlike any she has ever imagined, she comes to question her old beliefs and look at the world in a new light. The camp session is only 10 days long, but that may be all it takes to change a life forever.

We’ve all had moments of feeling like we didn’t belong, but imagine being born into a world where fitting in was never an option. Michele Sullivan, who has a rare form of dwarfism, shares how her physical posture taught her the most effective relational posture with others, which helped her become one of the most powerful women in philanthropy.

In 1997, Daniel Trush, a bright, active, outgoing twelve-year-old, collapsed on the basketball court and fell into a deep coma. Rushed to the hospital, he was found to have five previously undetected aneurysms in his brain. One had burst, causing a massive cerebral hemorrhage. While Daniel remained comatose, the uncontrolled pressure inside his skull caused him to suffer multiple strokes.

We treat the body as an afterthought, until it no longer can be. Until the pain or the pleasure is too great. Sinéad Gleeson's life has been marked by terrible illness, including leukemia and debilitating arthritis. As a child, she bathed in the springs of Lourdes, ever hopeful that her body would cooperate, ever looking forward to the day when she could take her body for granted. But just as she turns inward to explore her own pain, and then the marvel of recovery, and then the arrival of her greatest joys—falling in love, becoming a mother—she turns her gaze outward.

Learn about children who are blind, their challenges and adaptations, and their similarities with others.

Meg Zucker was born with one finger on each hand, shortened forearms, and one toe on each misshapen foot, caused by a genetic condition called ectrodactyly. She would eventually pass this condition on to her two sons, and, along with her husband, raise them and their adopted daughter, who has her own invisible differences. Born of the family’s hard-won experiences, this book offers invaluable advice on raising confident, empathetic, and resilient children who succeed, not despite but because of their differences.

The field of special education in 2022 has progressed to a point where we have ways to treat and support students with learning issues, and yet we frame so much of the special education process from a deficit-based mindset. Even the word "disability" supports this negative connotation of neurodiversity. This idea book outlines a paradigm for how to view and work with students with diagnoses formed through experience, research, and creativity in a way that supports an ability-forward mindset.

Connected at the chest by a band of flesh, Chang and Eng Bunker toured the United States and the world from the 1820s to the 1870s, placing themselves and their extraordinary bodies on exhibit as "freaks of nature". More famously known as the Siamese twins, they eventually settled in rural North Carolina, married two white sisters, became slave owners, and fathered 21 children between them. More than a biography of the twins, this is a study of 19th-century American culture and society that reveals how Americans projected onto the twins their own hopes and fears.

For over 30 years, The Silent Garden has offered parents of deaf children the support and unbiased information needed to fully realize their children’s potential. This completely revised third edition is a must-have resource that will help parents navigate the complex and unique challenges they face. Accessible, practical, and above all open-minded, The Silent Garden educates parents quickly and thoroughly about the many conflicting points of view on what is best for their deaf children.

This joyful audiobook with an empowering refrain, from disability rights activists Jessica Slice and Caroline Cupp, demystifies and respects how disabled people and their families use adaptive, imaginative, and considerate play so everyone can join in the fun.

In a series of beautifully textured stories, the author takes the listener on a fascinating journey as she travels with Teela, her lively "golden dog", through airports, city streets, and southwest desert landscapes, exploring these surroundings with changed sight. This unusual account of travel will inspire the sighted as well as the blind, offering pointed observations on processes of learning to work with a service animal and on coming to terms with a disability.

Ione Gamble never imagined that entering adulthood would mean being diagnosed with an incurable illness. Watching identity politics become social media fodder from the confines of her sickbed Ione began to pick apart our obsession with self-care, personal branding, productivity and #LivingYourBestLife. Using her experience with disability to cast a fresh gaze on the particularly peculiar cultural moment in which young women find themselves, Poor Little Sick Girls explores the pressures faced—as well as the power of existing as an unacceptable woman in our current era of empowerment.

Some people use wheelchairs to get to and from places. What does that mean? Listeners learn why someone would use a wheelchair and what daily life is like for someone who can't walk.

Junius Wilson (1908-2001) spent 76 years at a state mental hospital in Goldsboro, North Carolina, including 6 in the criminal ward. He had never been declared insane by a medical professional or found guilty of any criminal charge. But he was deaf and Black in the Jim Crow South. Unspeakable is the story of his life.

Ben Mattlin lives a normal, independent life. Why is that interesting? Because Mattlin was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a congenital weakness from which he was expected to die in childhood. Not only did Mattlin live through childhood, he became one of the first students in a wheelchair to attend Harvard, from which he graduated and became a professional writer. His advantage?

Public Hostage, Public Ransom starts with the autobiographical story of William Bronston, the activist physician whose early professional California training steels him with a deep moral, professional, and cultural bond to the huge 6,000-person disabled population he encounters incarcerated in Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, NY, on whose behalf he daily battles to humanize and ultimately catalyze a federal class action lawsuit against the state to close the death-making institution.

As director of legendary Pommery Champagnes, Philippe Pozzo di Borgo was not generally someone in the habit of asking for help. Then, in 1993, an accident left him a quadriplegic. Passing his days hidden in his Paris townhouse, Philippe found himself the modern equivalent of an “untouchable.” The only person who seemed not to be bothered by Philippe’s condition was someone who had been marginalized his entire life - Abdel, the unemployed, uninhibited immigrant from the outskirts of society who would become Philippe’s caretaker.