Showing titles in People with Disabilities

As one of Australia's most celebrated athletes, Michael Klim's impact extends far beyond the pool. Klim's journey to greatness began behind the Iron Curtain, in communist-era Poland. His family made a bid for freedom in the 1980s and immigrated to Australia, where swimming became his passport...

One woman's journey through progressive blindness and the extraordinary guide dog who kept her safe along the way When ethics scholar Deni Elliott, born with limited vision, realized she could no longer navigate the world safely alone, she turned to a guide dog—a decision that reshaped her...

In 2012, combat engineer Curtis McGrath was serving in the Australian army in Afghanistan when, in the line of duty, he stepped on a mine. Seriously injured but still conscious and aware he'd bleed out and die within minutes, McGrath, as the unit's chief first-aid officer, directed his comrades to apply tourniquets and administer an IV and morphine. Then, as he was stretchered to a helicopter, fearing he would never see his family again, he joked that he planned to become a Paralympian.

"Ich bin einer derer, die die Jahreskarte gezogen haben. Wenn ich abrutsche oder hochfliege, dann für eine lange Zeit. Dann bin ich nicht mehr zu halten, ob im Flug oder im Fall." Die fesselnde Chronik einer manisch-depressiven Erkrankung: ein autobiografisch radikales Werk von höchster literarischer Kraft.

Als Henry Markram ein autistisches Kind bekam, zählte er zu den berühmtesten Hirnforschern der Welt. Er arbeitete am Weizmann-Institut und am Max-Planck-Institut, gewann zahlreiche Forschungspreise und hielt Vorträge auf der ganzen Welt. Seine Methode, die misst, wie Zellen sich vernetzen, wurde internationaler Standard. Doch dann kam Kai. Und Fragen und Sorgen lagen auf einmal im Kinderzimmer, zwischen Teddybär und Mondlampe. Markrams geachtete Aufsätze vermochten seinem Sohn weniger zu helfen als das Liederbuch, aus dem er ihm abends vorsang.

A profoundly beautiful memoir about disability, difference, and living as a vulnerable body. Jan Grue had just become a father when he inherited a stack of his childhood medical records. Following a diagnosis of spinal muscular atrophy at the age of three, the raft of doctors' notes, clinical descriptions and case histories defined his body as defective and his future as bleak and limited. They conjured a childhood nothing like the one he remembered, that failed to anticipate the life he lived now. "I Live a Life Like Yours" is Grue's beautiful, groundbreaking search for a literary language that could better tell his story.

My body and its place in the world seemed quite normal to me. I didn’t grow up disabled, I grew up with a problem. A problem those around me wanted to fix. We have all felt that uncanny sensation that someone is watching us. The diagnosis helped but it didn’t fix everything. Don’t fear the...

Helen Keller has been inspiring people for over a hundred years now. After a terrible sickness left her deaf and blind at the young age of 19 months, most people would have wallowed in their misfortune and lived a life filled with self-pity, but not Helen. After meeting Anne Sullivan, a God-send who taught her how to overcome seemingly impossible odds and communicate using the manual alphabet, Helen overcame one obstacle after another, defying all odds against her.

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.

From FOX News anchor and author Harris Faulkner comes a collection of powerful, true-life stories of resilience, healing, rescue, and protection. We need reminders of God’s power now more than ever. We often think about prayer as a wish list, with God as Santa Claus. The reality is that the...

In seventeen intimate essays, poet Molly McCully Brown explores living within and beyond the limits of a body--in her case, one shaped since birth by cerebral palsy, a permanent and often painful movement disorder. In spite of--indeed, in response to--physical constraints, Brown leads a...

Before a surfing accident caused thirty-three-year-old Devon Raney to lose all but 15 percent of his vision, he had already lived an extraordinary life. Time and again he'd gone against the grain to maximize time for his passions--surfing, skateboarding, and snowboarding--bringing him into the...

A lively memoir of growing up with blind African American parents in a segregated cult preaching the imminent end of the world—for fans of James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird. It’s 1970, and Jerry Walker is six years old. His consciousness revolves around being a member of a church whose...

Reject the stigmas of trauma and chronic illness by fostering queer forms of intimacy—and embracing the many ways humans can care for one another. The writer behind the popular @softcore_trauma Instagram offers a deeply personal memoir for folks seeking healing and better care. The forms of...

The inspirational memoir from Paralympian and disability advocate Anne Wafula Strike, updated for 2024 Left partially paralysed below the rib cage by polio, Anne Wafula Strike was forced to flee her native Kenyan village, moving across the country with her family. After overcoming additional...

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?

Greg Marshall's early years were pretty bizarre. Rewind the VHS tapes (this is the nineties) and you'll see a lopsided teenager limping across a high school stage, or in a wheelchair after leg surgeries, pondering why he's crushing on half of the Utah Jazz. Add to this home video footage a mom clacking away at her newspaper column between chemos, a dad with ALS, and a cast of foulmouthed siblings. 

At the age of forty-three, Amy Lee Lillard learned she was autistic. She learned she was part of a community of unseen women who fell through the gaps due to medical bias and social stereotypes. A Grotesque Animal explores the making, unmaking, and making again of a woman with an undiagnosed disorder. How did a working-­class background and a deep-rooted Midwest culture of silence lead to hiding in plain sight for decades? How did sexuality and anger hide the roots of trauma among the women in her family?

Im August 2015 macht Katherine May sich auf, um den 1014 Kilometer langen South West Coast Path entlang der Küsten von Somerset, Devon und Cornwall nach Dorset zu wandern. Sie will den Kopf freibekommen, endlich verstehen, warum ihr so vieles in ihrem Leben schwerer zu fallen scheint als anderen: Warum hat sie immer wieder das Gefühl, nicht recht zu verstehen, was andere meinen, wenn sie mit ihr sprechen? Warum verspürt sie so oft den Impuls, aus einer Gruppe Menschen in die Einsamkeit zu flüchten? Und warum empfindet sie es als besonders herausfordernd, Mutter zu sein?

AutoBioPhilosophy is an astonishingly frank and original autobiography that explores the fundamental question of what it means to be human. Robert Rowland Smith’s life story involves a love triangle, office politics, police raids, illegal drugs, the academic elite and a near-death experience...