Social Disabilities

The year is 1995, and Gina leaves a failed relationship for a California Dream, only to find she can’t afford rent in the promised land. That’s OK, she’s not alone; the nonprofit social service agency that hires her into an entry level mental health job is dominated by a gang of sophomoric slackers, who literally spend 24/7 on the job; since they don’t get paid enough to pay rent, they simply don’t. It’s a makeshift commune of sorts, evolved of necessity. This fictional biography is a darkly comic, social services satire; the action has moved off the grounds of the State ...

Zane Obispo spends every day exploring the sleeping volcano in his backyard. "The Beast", as he calls it, is the one place where he can escape other kids, who make fun of him because he has a limp and walks with a cane. After a plane crashes into The Beast, a mysterious girl named Brooks shows up at Zane's doorstep, insisting that they meet at the volcano, where she will reveal a terrible secret. Zane agrees. Brooks tells him that the volcano is actually a centuries-old prison for the Mayan god of death, whose destiny is directly tied to Zane's.

While most people were preparing for the adventure of adult life, Chad E. Foster was watching the world he grew up with fade to black. But that didn’t stop him from becoming the first blind person to graduate from the Harvard Business School leadership program and climbing the corporate ladder as a successful finance/sales executive. With determination, ambition, and drive, Chad created what Oracle said would be impossible. He gave millions of people the ability to earn a living by becoming the first to create customer relationship software for the visually impaired.

Filing for VA disability benefits should be simple—submit your medical records, prove your service connection, and receive the compensation you deserve. But for many veterans, it’s anything but easy. The VA disability system is complicated and full of red tape, leaving thousands of veterans denied benefits or stuck with low ratings. In "Denied: Your VA Disability Claim", you’ll discover why so many claims are rejected and how to fix it. This guide provides practical advice to strengthen your case and successfully fight for your benefits.

All thirteen-year-old Houston Stewart has ever wanted is to become an astronaut. His dreams feel like they're finally coming true when he's accepted to the highly-competitive Junior Astronaut Recruitment Program—if only he could bring his little brother, Robbie, with him. Ever since their dad left, Houston and Robbie have been inseparable. It's hard to tell where Houston's love of space ends and where Robbie's begins. But Robbie's cerebral palsy and epilepsy mean he needs medical attention at home, so Houston is forced to take this giant leap for the two of them all on his own.

When Ashley Shew became a self-described "hard-of-hearing chemobrained amputee with Crohn's disease and tinnitus," there was no returning to "normal." Suddenly well-meaning people called her an "inspiration" while grocery shopping or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Most disabled people don't want what the abled assume they want—nor are they generally asked. In vibrant prose, Shew shows how we can create better narratives and more accessible futures by drawing from the insights of the cross-disability community.

Keeping children bodies, minds, and emotions on task just got easier with this new book from self-regulation expert Teresa Garland. Featuring more than 200 practical and proven interventions, strategies, and adaptations for helping children gain more control over their lives. Each chapter provides rich background and theoretical material to help the listener better understand the issues our children face.

A 25-year-old backcountry wanderer, a man happiest exploring wild places with his dog, Dan Bigley woke up one midsummer morning to a day full of promise. Before it was over, after a stellar day of salmon fishing along Alaska’s Kenai and Russian rivers, a grizzly came tearing around a corner in the trail. Dan barely had time for “bear charging” to register before it had him on the ground, altering his life forever.

John Robison argues that Asperger's is about difference, not disability. In this book he offers stories from his own life and from the lives of other Aspergians to give the reader a window into the Aspergian mind. Equally important, he offers practical advice - to Aspergians, their parents, and educators - on how Asperians can improve the weak communication and social skills that keep them from taking full advantage of, or even recognizing, their often remarkable gifts.

In Brilliant Imperfection, Eli Clare uses memoir, history, and critical analysis to explore cure—the deeply held belief that body-minds considered broken need to be fixed. Cure serves many purposes. It saves lives, manipulates lives, and prioritizes some lives over others. It provides comfort, makes profits, justifies violence, and promises resolution to body-mind loss. Clare grapples with this knot of contradictions, maintaining that neither an anti-cure politics nor a pro-cure worldview can account for the messy, complex relationships we have with our body-minds.

The Unteachables examines the overrepresentation of Black students in special education over the course of the twentieth century. As African American children integrated predominantly white schools, many were disproportionately labeled educable mentally retarded (EMR), learning disabled (LD), and emotionally behavioral disordered (EBD). Keith A. Mayes charts the evolution of disability categories and how these labels kept Black learners segregated in American classrooms.

In Imperfect, Jim Abbot retraces his remarkable journey. Born without a right hand, Jim Abbott as a boy dreamed of being a great athlete. Raised in Flint, Michigan, by parents who saw in his condition not a disability but an extraordinary opportunity, Jim became a two-sport standout in high school, then an ace pitcher for the University of Michigan. But his journey was only beginning. By 21, he’d won the gold medal game at the 1988 Olympics and cracked the starting rotation of the California Angels....

Jadie never spoke. She never laughed, or cried, or uttered any sound. Despite efforts to reach her, Jadie remained locked in her own troubled world - until one remarkable teacher persuaded her to break her self-imposed silence. Nothing in all of Torey Hayden's experience could have prepared her for the shock of what Jadie told her - a story too horrendous for Torey's professional colleagues to acknowledge.

Thirty-four-year-old Rebecca Alexander is a psychotherapist, a spin instructor, a volunteer, and an athlete. She is also almost completely blind, with significantly deteriorated hearing. Not Fade Away is a deeply moving exploration of the obstacles we all face-physical, psychological, and philosophical. Rebecca's story is an exquisite reminder to live each day to its fullest.

Rescue thought he'd grow up to be a Seeing Eye dog - it's the family business, after all. When he gets the news that he's better suited to being a service dog, he's worried that he's not up to the task. Then he meets Jessica, a girl whose life is turning out differently than the way she'd imagined it, too. Now Jessica needs Rescue by her side to help her accomplish everyday tasks. And it turns out that Rescue can help Jessica see after all: a way forward, together, one step at a time.

As a deafblind woman with partial vision in one eye and bilateral hearing aids, Elsa Sjunneson lives at the crossroads of blindness and sight, hearing and deafness—much to the confusion of the world around her. And she knows how wrong our one-size-fits-all definitions of disability can be. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part history of the deafblind experience, Being Seen explores how our cultural concept of disability is more myth than fact, and the damage it does to us all.

In the beloved classic book The Way I See It, Dr. Temple Grandin gets to the real issues of autism — the ones parents, teachers, and individuals on the spectrum face every day. In this updated and expanded fifth edition, Temple offers helpful dos and don’ts, practical strategies, and try-it-now tips all based on her insider perspective and a great deal of research.

I sincerely believe it is extremely important for legitimately disabled Americans to be cared for in a country that takes pride in helping those who are less-fortunate - not those who are looking for a free ride or for a chance to scam the system but who are truly and sincerely in need. There are policies practiced or enforced by the social security disability program for example that cause deserving applicants to be denied (the main subject of this audiobook) and in some cases, less-deserving or undeserving applicants to be accepted by the same benefits program.

My friend Sarah has a disability called Down Syndrome. But that doesn’t matter to us. We tell jokes and laugh, go to ballet class together, and have a lot of fun. I’m glad Sarah is my friend!

Thirteen-year-old Nat Beacon loves a lot of things: her dog Warbucks, her best friend Chloe, and competing on her wheelchair racing team, the Zoomers, to name a few. But there's one thing she's absolutely obsessed with: musicals! From Hamilton to Les Mis, there's not a cast album she hasn't memorized and belted along to. She's never actually been in a musical though, or even seen an actor who uses a wheelchair for mobility on stage. Would someone like Nat ever get cast?