Disability Rights

Historically, they have borne the labels "freaks" and "oddities"; they have been collected as pets, displayed as spectacles, and treated as comic relief. Now, for the first time, in this comprehensive volume, the lives of dwarfs are explored in all their fullness and humanity. Spanning the centuries from ancient Egypt to the present, this unique social history chronicles the various ways this population has been exploited, describes their strategies for coping, and notes the persistent influence of mythology upon perceptions of them by others.

Learning disabilities (LD) are a root cause of major problems in our society. Vast numbers of youngsters are not receiving appropriate education. Nancy Lelewer’s story began when even less was known about learning disabilities than is known today. In a gripping and fast-moving narrative style, this audiobook brings home the fact that LD persons need to receive instruction via different routes and the earlier the better.

When someone would tap along and rescue me from being sandwiched between these two hardbacks, sorry, did I frighten you? You never heard or seen a talking book. Well, me either. The majority of the time, I am the only one in the room, or shall I say, “on the shelf”? So many humans walk right past me, playing blind games by pretending not to see that the struggle is real. Talk about the lack of accessibility.

This is Nadina LaSpina's story - from her early years in her native Sicily, where she contracts polio as a baby, a fact that makes her the object of well-meaning pity and the target of messages of hopelessness, to her adolescence and youth in America, spent almost entirely in hospitals where she is tortured in the quest for a cure and made to feel that her body no longer belongs to her, and to her rebellion and her activism in the disability-rights movement.