Disability Biography

The story of Dr Amo Raju OBE DL is truly remarkable. Today, he is a multi-award winning member of society. Yet as a disabled child to present day, many around him have attempted to determine his future according to their own limiting expectations which led him to a thirty-year secret ‘relationship’ with depression. Authors Amo and Mani have ensured the protagonist, AJ Rai, based on Dr Amo Raju OBE DL, takes you on a journey of pain, heartache, laughter and triumph whilst capturing real-life scenarios which will keep you gripped to the next chapter.

Damaged is a story of survivor's guilt coupled with resentment tempered by love. It reveals the changing dynamics of a family faced with an injury no one could heal. Nancy Klein was in the first trimester of her second pregnancy when she made headlines as "Coma Mom." This intimate memoir, written by Klein's sister, reveals all that happened to her and her family after the news cycle moved on. The family: a mother who never gave up hope, even when hope was long gone, and a father who couldn't live without his wife's love.

Hilda’s family didn’t know she had muscular dystrophy. They just knew their preschooler was losing her ability to walk. But they were determined to find a cure. Being disabled in Cameroon meant not only obstacles to transport, but visits to diviners and evangelists, threats of sexual assault, discrimination, and a crisis of faith. Despite the hardship Hilda has faced, her family’s unwavering support and God’s unwavering grace have helped her persevere to become a national broadcaster.

Born four weeks premature and weighing little more than five pounds, Scott A. McCreight had a rough start and uncertain future. He was placed for adoption, but the good news didn’t last long: shortly after, Scott was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Developmental delays permeated his childhood, the odds for a “normal” life seemingly stacked against him.

«Sono Rachele e ho 29 anni. A un mese dalla nascita, è stato detto ai miei genitori che avevo la fibrosi cistica, una malattia genetica degenerativa da cui non si può guarire. La malattia non si vede perché colpisce principalmente gli organi interni; tutte le secrezioni sono alterate e molto dense, il muco ristagna ed è difficile respirare. Quando sono stata invitata a un evento della Fondazione per la Ricerca sulla Fibrosi Cistica, mi sono chiesta: come faccio a unire la mia passione per i motori con quello che mi sta più a cuore?»

Robert was a young man struggling to make it on his own when in 1990, he suffered a violent and traumatic experience when someone put a bullet through his brain. Robert tells the amazing story of survival during a time when life shriveled to dark emptiness and his future seemed hopeless.

Growing up in Mineral Wells, Texas during the 1950s and 60s was anything but idyllic for Walter Ashby. Due to a misdiagnosis and medical error, his sister Janie went from being a lively young girl to a shell of a person who required their parents’ attention 24 hours a day, every day. To add insult to injury, his parents received another blow: before Walter was six-years-old, he lost 98 percent of his vision, leaving him legally blind.

There Are No Answers Here, Only Questions is the true story of two life-altering events and the personal transformation that resulted from their unlikely collision. It's the story of an owner preparing to sell his business and retire just as he is diagnosed with cancer.

This book is about the life of the author. It focuses on her faith, her hope, and her endurance during the years of her illness. In this true story, you will learn the how and why about the effects that changed her family’s life—the author’s Crohn’s disease, the 14 blood clots, toxic gut syndrome, colitis, tumors, ulcers, vertigo, weight gain and loss, pregnancies, the many surgeries, and how her body would not wake up after some of her surgeries.

Robert L. Metts was an adventurer and a disability activist that cared deeply about the lives of people with disabilities around the world. After receiving a BA in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, Bob continued his education there to earn a PhD in economics with a focus on economic development. While in Kenya conducting research for his PhD dissertation, he had firsthand experience with the conditions disabled people faced in developing countries.

Si no es cada cuatro años que se celebran los paralímpicos, si no se acerca el Día Internacional de las pcd, cuando las marcas realizan acciones; si no es que el gobierno da beneficios fiscales para impulsar la inserción laboral de este grupo, el resto del tiempo las personas con discapacidad viven entre las sombras.

"Det var inget jag hade valt, detta att inte höra ihop med dem. Det var bara så att jag inte gjorde det. Jag kunde inte ändra på det och jag visste inte vad en människa var meningen att vara. Inuti kände jag mig ledsen. Varför blev de alltid så arga? Varför begrep de inte?". Redan i tidig ålder insåg Gunilla Gerland att hon inte var som alla andra. Hon ville gärna röra vid saker som var böjda, undvek helst att tugga maten och hade ett stort behov av att få vara ifred.

At the age of sixty, and having lived with Parkinson’s disease for over ten years, Guy Deacon CBE set out on one last adventure: to drive solo from his home in the UK 18,000 miles and through twenty-five countries to Cape Town on the southern tip of Africa. This incredible journey, across Europe and down the full length of Africa, took the former British Army officer over twelve months. Along the way, he broke down five times, underwent one emergency evacuation, and took 3,650 prescription pills.

Martin Hibbert was left paralysed from the waist down by the Manchester Arena bombing which killed twenty-two people on 22 May 2017. Martin’s teenage daughter Eve was one of the 940 injured, in Eve’s case, gravely. The dad from Bolton has since become a leading campaigner both for victims of the atrocity and those with spinal cord injuries. Determined to make a difference he took on the ultimate challenge, scaling Kilimanjaro in a wheelchair, becoming the second paraplegic to do so, and raising a million pounds for charity.

In this inspiring memoir, Emily Falcon chronicles her lifelong journey with a congenital cardiac condition. In 1982, at seven weeks old, she had a heart attack that destroyed 40 percent of the left side of her heart. This was her entry into a world of multiple cardiac procedures, surgeries, hospitalizations, and a later diagnosis of glaucoma. Balancing these serious conditions defined her life.

When Emmett de Monterey is eighteen months old, a doctor diagnoses him with cerebral palsy. Words too big for his 25-year-old artist parents and their happy, smiling baby. Growing up in South East London in the 1980s, Emmett is spat at on the street and prayed over at church. At his school for disabled children, he's told he will be expelled if the rumours are true, if he's gay; at his mainstream school, teachers refuse to schedule his classes on the ground floor, and he loses a stone from the effort of getting up the stairs.

When Pepper Stetler was told that her daughter who has Down Syndrome would be regularly required to take IQ tests to secure support in school, she asked a simple question: why? In questioning the authority and relevance of the test, Stetler sets herself on a winding investigation into how the IQ test came to be the irrefutable standard for measuring intelligence. The unsettling history causes Stetler to wonder what influence this test will have over her daughter's future and whether Louisa should be taking it at all.

Musical director and arranger David Loud, a legendary Broadway talent, recounts his wildly entertaining and deeply poignant trek through the wilderness of his childhood and the edge-of-your-seat drama of a career on, in, under, and around Broadway for decades. He reveals his struggle against the ravages of Parkinson's and triumphs repeatedly. This memoir is also a remarkable love letter to music. Loud is the Ted Lasso of the theater business, ever the optimist!

In this intimate story of relationship resilience, marine biologist Beth Mathews’s adventurous life as a professor and mother in Alaska is upended when her healthy husband is slammed by a rare type of stroke. Jim’s radical approach to recovery clashes with Beth’s instinct to keep him safe at home and sets them on a collision course as he insists on ambitious sailing expeditions with Beth and their young son in Alaska’s magnificent yet unforgiving waters.

Sam always knew he was starting life on the back foot. When his parents split, Sam, his mother and his brother had to learn to survive in a world not built for single-parent families. Add to that Sam's diagnosis with a form of dwarfism and the odds seemed stacked against them. As surgeons kept breaking and resetting Sam's legs in attempts to keep him walking, disability and poverty collided, and it took all the family's strength not to crumple in the impact. In Broke, lawyer and disability advocate Sam Drummond weaves a poignant, stirring and deeply compassionate tale of life on the fringes.