Disability Memoir

Eight Fingers and Eight Toes: Accepting Life's Challenges is a story of the power of a mother's love for her children and her journey of self-love. It is a story of struggles and learning to accept and overcome challenges. One takes a front row seat as the author learns answers to questions asked decades ago that result in part from the family being the first ever to have their entire genome sequenced.

It’s 1970, and Jerry Walker is six years old. His consciousness revolves around being a member of a church whose beliefs he finds not only confusing but terrifying. Composed of a hodgepodge of requirements and restrictions—including a prohibition against doctors and hospitals—the underpinning tenet of Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God was that its members were divinely chosen and all others would soon perish in rivers of flames.

Die sechzehnjährige Nujeen erzählt, wie der syrische Krieg eine stolze Nation zerstört, Familien auseinanderreißt und Menschen zur Flucht zwingt. In Nujeens Fall zu einer Reise durch neun Länder, in einem Rollstuhl. Doch es ist auch die Geschichte einer willensstarken jungen Frau, die in Aleppo durch eine Krankheit ans Haus gefesselt ist und sich mit amerikanischen Seifenopern Englisch beibringt, weil sie die starke Hoffnung auf ein besseres Leben hat.

Published in 1996, Life as We Know It introduced Jamie Bérubé to the world as a sweet, bright, gregarious little boy who loves The Beatles, pizza, and making lists. At four he is like many young people his age, but his Down syndrome leads most people to see him only in terms of his disability. Twenty years later Michael Bérubé chronicles his son's growth and his growing love of the world, writing as both a disability studies scholar and as a father.

The GIs called her Joey. Hundreds owed their lives to the tiny Filipina who stashed explosives in spare tires, tracked Japanese troop movements, and smuggled maps of fortifications across enemy lines. As the Battle of Manila raged, Josefina Guerrero walked through gunfire to bandage wounds and close the eyes of the dead. Her valor earned her the Medal of Freedom, but what made her a good spy was also destroying her: leprosy, which so horrified the Japanese they refused to search her.

When you hear the word “disability”, what comes to mind? Cheryl Schiltz tells her story of being introduced to disability. She shares her journey from a silent world to one that encased her in constant anxiety. Her life as she knew it had disappeared. It became one of a continuous fight between psychological and physical change. Noise. From her childhood, you’ll find yourself traveling with her as she discovers the power to gain control. She shares her story openly and honestly, raw and sensitive.

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.

When I found out I had cancer, I only knew one person who had beat it, and she did not come to mind. Finding out the president had beat it without chemo or radiation gave me hope. I feel my assistance was critical to my beating cancer. Your own research and knowledge, along with your gut feelings, will help guide you. This book is my belief, and I feel cancer is beatable because I was able to beat it. I believe thinking out of the box is sometimes the solution.

An inspiring story of hope, strength and courage. After doctors said there was no hope for her newborn daughter, this mother refused to give up. Despite her daughter’s severe disabilities, Lucy went on to touch many lives with her presence and became her mother’s greatest teacher.

In a Lifetime Fight: Living with Cerebral Palsy author Amanda Forry/Fino invites listeners to follow her journey towards healing and hope. After suffering a disabling accident and enduring a lifetime of abuse, Amanda is forced to rely on her own strength and courage to confront the traumas of her past and to find a path forward.

Kimberly Crowe was back for the second year in a row with a world-renowned event in honor of International Women’s Day. International Women’s Day (IWD) 2022 celebrates the tremendous efforts of women and girls around the world in shaping the future. This summit was an epic, fun, connecting, and delightful one-day virtual event in celebration of International Women’s Day, March 8, 2022. Our speakers are an amazing array of women bringing their brilliance to serve the greater good and contribute their zone of genius to the world.

Rick Werry was living the good life in beautiful Monroe, Utah. He was a young, athletic man who woke up every morning doing what he loved for work, and he had been lucky enough to marry his college sweetheart. A year after their marriage, all of that suddenly halted when an onsite construction injury nearly claimed his life.

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.

Henry Markram is the Elon Musk of neuroscience, the man behind the billion-dollar Blue Brain Project to build a supercomputer model of the brain. He has set the goal of decoding all disturbances of the mind within a generation. This quest is personal for him. The driving force behind his grand ambition has been his son Kai, who has autism. Raising Kai made Henry Markram question all that he thought he knew about neuroscience, and then inspired his groundbreaking research that would upend the conventional wisdom about autism, expressed in his now-famous theory of Intense World Syndrome.

At age 54, Chris Monnette is diagnosed with neovascular macular degeneration, an incurable retinal disease that slowly robs him of his eyesight. As each cell in his macula dies and his vision diminishes, he is forced, literally and figuratively, to see the world through different eyes. Raised in the shadow of an emotionally stifled father, Chris learns early on to mirror the belief that vulnerability equals weakness. A piercingly honest meditation on the emotional legacy of stoicism, Seeing Clearly is much-needed proof that being a man and being vulnerable are one and the same.

I was born living the American dream. I had a mother and father who loved me. An older sister who cared for me. A beautiful house on a lake and extended family close by. But life has this way of flipping you inside out. By age two, we'd lost our home. By age six, my mother had died. For the next five years, we moved from place to place, crisscrossing the country.

At the age of thirty, just as everything was falling into place for him, Lee Pesky died of brain cancer. For his father, Alan, grief came with the realization that he had lost the chance to love Lee as he was—not as he wanted him to be. Ambitious, successful, and always striving for more, Alan had a hard time relating to a son who struggled with learning disabilities at a time when there was little understanding or help for kids who had them. Their relationship was complicated, and now, Lee was gone.

Have you ever wondered how a blind person pours a cup of coffee? Or how they and their guide dog know when it's safe to cross a busy road? When Lois Strachan lost her sight at the age of 21 years, she had to learn the answers to these and countless other questions of how to live as a blind person in a sighted world. In this delightfully quirky and entertaining book, Lois shares some of the secrets she discovered about how to live an “ordinary” life in an extraordinary way despite her disability.

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!

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.