Showing titles in People with Disabilities

Jon Sadler was four when he had his first seizure following an episode of high fever. That made him the object of constant concern to his family and dictated almost every decision he made. With medication, Jon was deemed seizure-free for several years, though his speech was permanently affected. After a college sailing accident, he had his first grand mal seizure (loss of consciousness and violent muscle contractions).

Lionheart is an inspiring story of love, forgiveness, and the power of music. On April 27, 2016, while riding his bicycle in Nashville, Tennessee, David was hit by a distracted driver. Doctors told him he would never walk again. His life had changed forever. Lionheart is the richly detailed and intimate account of David's crash, recovery, and return to music: From thinking he lost everything, to appearing on national television (twice), to marrying his soulmate, Kristi - to finding a life and purpose beyond his wildest imagination.

Robert Mercer's life could have been very different. He was born with very low vision and as a youngster struggled in school. But through the intervention of a caring teacher and the support of his family, he found his way to the Halifax School for the Blind and into the classroom of Mrs. Beaton. It was there he discovered his voice, a voice he uses to recount his remarkable journey from a shy little boy to a community leader.

Everyone always ask me what it is like being autistic. The reality is, being autistic is unique to each person. In this audiobook, I explain an aspect of my autism called "escaping into imagination" and how I use it to create a make-believe world to accelerate how amazing my autism is. It has often been said that people with autism struggle with pretend-play. I feel this is a misunderstanding. Just because we do not pretend play like other kids does not mean we do not have imaginations or use them to pretend in our own world.

Seahawks star running back Curt Warner and his wife, Ana, were prominent figures in Seattle in the early 1990s. When they dropped from the public eye after Curt’s retirement, everyone assumed it was for a simpler life. But the reality behind their seclusion was a secret they hid from even their closest friends: their twins, Austin and Christian, had been diagnosed with severe autism. What followed was a painful struggle to hold their family and their marriage together in a home filled with chaos, emotional exhaustion, and constant fear for the safety of their unpredictable but beloved boys.

Blind from birth, Graeme Innes was blessed with a family who refused to view his blindness as a handicap, instilling in him a belief in his own abilities; blessed with a determination to persevere. After a long and successful career as a lawyer, company director and Human Rights Commissioner, Graeme has written his story. Finding a Way shares his memories of love and support, challenges, failures and overcoming the discrimination so many people with disabilities face.

A young man once called unteachable journeys across America to investigate the lives of those, like himself, who are forced to create new ways of living in order to survive.

An unflinching and luminous memoir that explores a father’s philosophical transformation when he must reconsider the questions what makes us human? and whose life is worth living? Before becoming a father, Chris Gabbard was a fast-track academic finishing his doctoral dissertation at Stanford. A disciple of Enlightenment thinkers, he was a devotee of reason, believed in the reliability of science, and lived by the dictum that an unexamined life is not worth living. That is, until his son August was born.

Hearing Maud: A Journey for a Voice is a work of creative non-fiction that details the author’s experiences of deafness after losing most of her hearing at age four. It charts how, as she grew up, she was estranged from people and turned to reading and writing for solace, eventually establishing a career as a writer. Central to her narrative is the story of Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of 19th century Queensland expatriate novelist Rosa Praed.

No one would ever guess that simply hanging curtains could be life-changing! In the blink of an eye, Paula's world turned upside down as a broken leg morphed into life threatening events that pushed her reality into a darkness we only see in movies. Legless tells the story of Paula's fight to triumph over heartbreaking trauma while depression and suffering snapped at her desire to live. Unwilling to surrender for the sake of her family, she dug deep into the meaning of life at every setback and found herself changed, transformed and seeing herself through the eyes of a new normal.

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.

Many people give up on God. It’s easy to trust in his goodness and strength when life is easy. But how do we persevere in our faith when life gets hard? Few people can show us how to do that better than Allan Schwartz.

"My name is Linda Buchan, and when I was 18 years old I died. It was Saturday, June 27, 1998, when my young life ended and my new life began. A life that was to be so completely different to the one that I had envisaged, the one that I had expected...." In Linda Buchan's raw and powerful memoir, she shares her journey from the terrible night when the life and future she thought lay ahead of her was shattered.

Starting at the age of 12, Derek's life began to get much more complicated. An internal struggle was about to take hold. Its grip would cause unimaginable anxiety. The normal thoughts and feelings he had prior were a distant memory. This had to be dealt with using irrational methods. Over time he had to manage and cope the best way he could. This is a true account of one Northwest man's experiences living with the mental disorder known as OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder).

Twisted Rage is a compilation of thoughts coming from the mind of a man who lives with schizophrenia. It exhibits confusion between good and evil, right and wrong, and all other extremes. The confusion brings the listener down a path of empathy for the writer, sympathy for the writer, hope for the writer, and ultimately love for the writer.

Genius or Lunatic goes deeper into the mind of a paranoid schizophrenic. There is so much confusion in there. So much contradiction. So much religiosity. And there is much desire to know, understand, and find the truth. Along the ride you will find yourself saying, "But in this poem didn't he just say this"? It will bring out emotions that you won't expect. This brings you into his pain and lets you experience it firsthand.

يحكي هذا الكتاب قصّة حياة الملياردير "علي بنات" وهو أسترالي من أصول فلسطينية عاش حياة الترف والبذخ بكامل تفاصيلها فقد كان يمتلك كل ما يريد؛ شركات، عقارات، وأسطولًا من السيارات الفاخرة.

What do you do when your reality slips away? If you're Sky Yardley and Jane Dwinell, you accept each new challenge, reshape your life, and write. When Sky was diagnosed with "probable early stage Alzheimer's" at age 66, he was determined to live as fully as possible. He researched dementia, talked about dementia, connected with other people with the disease, and wrote about it.

In this fascinating story, Yahye reveals, in his own words, mesmerising incidents of resilience, exclusions and inclusions, an identity crisis, divine-connection, and an unparalleled zest for a purposeful life, all through a captivating, humorous, and candid style.

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.