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At age 8, Beth was diagnosed with juvenile onset diabetes. At first, she thought it was pretty cool, but in her teenage years, she didn't take care of herself as well as a diabetic needs to. In the hospital at age 17, a doctor told Beth she wouldn't live to see 30. She took that as a sign that she needed to live what life was left to her. The doctor was right in one respect; Beth didn't see 30; she had gone blind by then. Becoming blind forces a lot of change into Beth's life. She has to learn to live her life with out using her eyes. She has to cope with a changed relationship with other people; employment is much harder to find when you are always underestimated. Being diabetic, Beth and her husband hadn't planned on having kids. But when Beth becomes pregnant, she carries the baby anyhow. Carefully she makes her way through pregnancy, but her son Gus has a disorder not related to her diabetes, trisomy 12p(I'm not giving anything away- you can see Gus in the author picture). Beth pulls through. Beth pulls through is something that happens over and over in this book. She pulls through troubles in her life, in her marriage, in employment- she pulls through. She pulls through complaining and gritting her teeth, but she pulls through. Happy reading.
Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot by John Callahan
Out drunk with a friend who was also drunk, Callahan was in a car crash that left him quadriplegic. After a long and painful stay in the hospital, Callahan went to a rehabilitation center. There he learned, among other things, how to have sex without being able to feel his dick. Out of rehab, he stayed n various interesting places. He was thrown out of a nursing home because he was alcoholic. Some time later, Callahan decided that his biggest problem wasn't that he was quadriplegic; it was his alcoholism. So he joined AA and stayed off the booze. He put into practice the things he had learned in rehab, and began to live more independantly. He became a cartoonist, and was printed in many magazines. But this did not allow him to live off his own wages; due to the fact that insurance companies wouldn't insure him, he needed to stay on medicaid. So all of his money had to go to Welfare. This is irreverant in the extreme, which makes me a bit uncomfortable. Callahan says that he is just as happy to get a strong negative reaction as a positive one, and I guess he gets one or the other. I also was disturbed by his misogyny. Callahan claims that his misogyny is due to the fact that he is adopted, but no matter what it's attributable to, I don't like hearing or reading women called bitches. The text is illustrated with Callahan's comics. The comics are meant to be about the text, but I couldn't always figure out how they matched. Interesting reading.
What's that Pig Outdoors: A Memoir of Deafness by Henry Kisor
At almost three and a half, young Hank became ill. Doctors did not know if he would live. Hank became deaf. Temporarily, he also lost his sense of balance. Kisor's mother decided to teach him to speak and to retain what speech he did have using the method of Miss Mirrielees. Kisor learned to read, lipread and speak well enough to be integrated into a hearing classroom. Through elementary school, high school, college, journalism school, and his work on various newspapers, Kisor has always been in the hearing culture. Culturally, he is a member of the hearing world; his wife, friends, coworkers, are all hearing. But even a successful oralist has his problems and mishaps in the hearing world. Lipreading is never a sure thing- Kisor recognizes some words and guesses the rest. And 10% of the people he meets are impossible to lipread. His speech problems are also extant- while he can(at the time of this book's writing in 1990) go to Northwestern when his speech becomes unitelligible, to relearn his speech, speech therapy was not so easy to get when he was growing up. When deaf people were generally seen as stupid and incapable of integration, Kisor's success met with resistance from those with preconceived negative perceptions of deaf people, but Kisor succeeded despite them. This book is for hearing people to understand more about what deaf people can acheive. It is about Kisor, an oralist, who tries not to be too political on the topic of oralism vs. ASL. This story can also be read as a success story of a man who has overcome a communications disability. As he notes, deafness affects his ability to communicate. Happy reading
Braving Home Dispatches from the Underwater Town, the Lava-Side Inn, and Other Extreme Locales by Jake Halpern
Some people choose to live in dangerous and uncomfortable places. After being told to evacuate, they stay, risking life and limb, money and property to do so. And some people choose to live out of the way, living in out of the way places where the sun doesn't shine(literally) long after danger forced them there. Halpern talks to one resiliant resident of each of Princeville, North Carolina, Whittier, Alaska, Royal Gardens, Hawaii, Malibu, California, and Grand Isle, Louisiana. Four of these places are periodically destroyed, and the other is an indoor town, started as a military base. Through talking to these people, Halpern discusses what makes a home and why people stay. He also shows the vast variety of conditions that people live in. Happy reading.
If white supremicists from South Africa were to get ahold of a time machine going back exactly 150 years, what would they do with it? Maybe they would go back to an era in which white supremacy had a stronghold- the american south. And once there, they would do their best to manipulate the civil war such that the south would win. Turtledove proposes these maybes, having his time travelers arm the confederacy with AK-47s. The confederacy wins the war. But having won it, the time travelers are in for a surprise- the south is not as stuck on supremacy as they had thought. Turtledove admits to portraying a sympathetic portrait of Lee- he feels that this is how Lee was. This portrayal is integral to the plot. The plot is captivating, as is, for the most part, Turtledove's style. But the dialouge is sadly lacking. When troops concede, Turtledove has them do so with unrealistic language. Lincoln's speeches also seem unrealistic- in his defeat, Lincoln repeats himself over and over. Happy reading.
Madness on the Couch Blaming the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis by Edward Dolnick
When Freud had a friend operate on a patient of his in the hopes of curing her neuroses, the patient almost dies of hemorrhage. Freud was deeply troubled, until he came up with an explanation- the patient had almost died because she wanted Freud's attention! She did not want to recover. On a similar vein, Freud warned against attempting to treat schizophrenics- he said that they were not open to recovery. Thus began the grand psychoanalytic claim that victims of psychological disorders chose to be ill. Unfortunately, Freud's followers did not heed his warning. They attempted to use psychoanalysis to treat schizophrenia and autism, which Freud refused to touch. With schizophrenia and autism, the psychoanalysts saw external factors as the only possibly cause. Therefore they blamed the families of schizophrenics and autists, thereby depriving these people of their most likely advocates. They attempted to remove schizophrenics and autists from the families they were sure had abused them. And when parents did not fit their models, they assumed that parents were very good at subterfuge. But in the late 1960s, studies proved the heredity of schizophrenia by studying adopted schizophrenics and the adopted children of schizophrenics. They showed that the children of schizophrenics are as likely to be schizophrenic whether or not they are raised by their parents. With autism, no such studies are shown, and autism's link to psychoanalysis is vague at best; Dolnick never states that Bettelheim had any thoughts of Freud. Instead, he shows Bettelheim to be the fraud he has been known as in the decades since his death. He describes Bettelheim's claims and their effects, quoting extensively from The Sound of a Miracle in which Annabel Stehli describes how she was treated as the parent of an autistic girl. He also describes Bernard Rimland's rebuttal of Bettelheim, although he presents Rimland's theory simplified and in an early form. To hammer the nail in the coffin of psychoanalysis on the not-so-normal, Dolnick covers the psychoanalytic mistreatment of a disorder Freud approved of: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Freud had claimed that OCD was caused by guilt, and that compulsions were caused by symbolically acting to correct the guilt. Freud claimed to be able to cure OCD; he claimed as exhibit A of his psychoanalytic skills. His followers refused to accord it even that level of difficulty; they claimed to be able to cured OCD in six months. But their claims were false, and with the coming of drugs which could cure many cases of OCD, psychoanalysts who had claimed to treat OCD were sued. OCD was even shown to be curable in dogs with the same medication that cures OCD in humans, making it unlikely that Freud's speculation held any truth: dogs suffering from guilt over masturbation? Yeah, right! This is a criticism not on psychoanalysis but on psychoanalysis as treatment of brain disorders. As such it is a sound critique. Dolnick spends part 1, about a ninth of his narrative, on Freud. But only his section on OCD, which is even smaller than the section on Freud, seems to be about work descended from his. The work with schizophrenics was a break from orthodox Freudianism, and psychoanalysts were not shown to be to blame for the refrigerator mother theory of autism. The "heyday" of psychoanalysis is taken to be the American heyday, during the 1950s and 60s. I don't like Dolnick's portrayal of autism. He cites as common knowledge that 80% of autists are retarded. Dolnick uses footnotes and endnotes copiously, although his endnotes are not the sort with numbers by the citations. I was a little bit startled when I recognized one of the first quotations in this book as being from Welcome To My Country, which I had just read. Also unusual, all of the positives takes on this book shown on the back cover are from authors cited in this work! Cautious/ indignant reading.
Her very first job as a psychologist, Lauren Slater is hired as group therapist for a home of schizophrenic men. Although her training has lead her to instruct the men that they are being irrational when they are being irrational, in a tired moment she tries to join the men in their fantastic worlds. Her group takes the spaceship which has landed on Oscar's belly, and- they connect! So Slater continues to join the men in their worlds, and she finds herself a welcome visitor. When Moxi, whose family of origin came from Vietnam, declares that his family is this group, he then welcomes each to his country. Slater alternates chapters on the schizophrenic men with chapters about her other patients, and her next chapter contrasts sharply with her first; in this instance she is working with a man who is integrated in society, a man who is passing for normal, towards whom Slater feels attracted. She compares his misogyny, his violence towards women, with her own past anorexia, placing them both as victims of a womanizing culture. Her schizophrenics' sexuality is seen as loneliness; she makes them almost asexual. Slater views her schizophrenics as human, stuck with disabilities frustrating them as much as they do her. The hypergraphic schizophrenic Joseph's writings are turned into poetry, as Slater attempts to filter out the parts she thinks were simply thrown in as the schizophrenic's tendency to overinclusion. Slater concludes by placing herself among the ranks of the sort of sane- revisiting the institution in which she was once a patient, and now has a patient. Stirring reading.
There are three kids in Jonno's family: Jonno(11), Lizzie(9), and James(4). But when Jonno's mother says "you kids", she's only referring to Jonno and Lizzie. That's because James is autistic. He'd been normal until he was about two, and after that he doesn't talk, has no interest in people, only eats certain foods, hates being touched, etc. Jonno hates having James mess up his life, deplete the family savings(treatment and diagnosis are expensive), and just be different. Then two things happen: James is accepted into a special school which calls upon the family to assist them in educating James, and a really weird kid joins Jonno's class. The kid, Edward, is really fat, has never been in a regular class before, and has no social skills. Seeing his chance to be an in-kid, Jonno nicknames the new boy Edweird. James' school's educational technique is a form of ABA, where he is rewarded for good behaviors and punished for the "bad". ABA is portrayed inaccurately here in that the rewards are not all things James like; ABA does not reward good behaviors with what it hopes a kid will learn to like. Autism here is portrayed in a negative but accurate manner. That Jonno never makes the connection between Edweird and James frustrated me. Through out the book, I was waiting for the announcement that Edweird had Aspergers, and could be linked to James. Because it was written in 1984, this book is out of date. The title refers to some people's inability to hide their emotions; Jonno figures that they're inside out. Happy reading.
Multiple Personality Disorder, listed in the DSM-III, is not in the DSM-IV. It was replaced by Dissociative Identity Disorder, joing three other, less extreme, dissociative disorders, and acknowledging that DID is part of a continuum. This continuum starts with normal people who dissociate when they are engrossed in movies or their daily activities, and ends with switchers who have different named personalities. These dissassociations begin as coping mechanisms in difficult/traumatic situations, but continue long after they are useful. Stout works with trauma victims, many of whom have used dissociation as a protective measure in their lives. Now they find that they have lapses during which they do not know what they have been doing, or during which they are helplessly watching themselves acting differently. Through confronting their childhoods and working through their pasts, these courageous people enrich their lives. Stout cites as obvious cases of dissociation scenes which don't look obvious to me, even though I was paying attention to what I was reading. She generalizes too much. Her statistics don't always agree with each other. Nonetheless, she has a point and makes it. She does have a chapter on what to do if this book seems to be describing you or someone you know, so if someone you know is zoning out too much or has frequent amnesia, maybe you should read this book. Happy reading.
Exiting Nirvana: A Daughter's Life With Autism By Clara Claiborne Park, illustrated by Jessy Park
In the preface to this book, Oliver Sacks comments that Jessica Park may be the most documented autist. Her early childhood was documented in Seige, in which she was called Elly in case she would ever grow up to be embarrassed about her childhood self. She didn't. In this book, published in 2001, Jessy does not feel embarresment over past behavior. She is still autistic, and her mother does not hope for her to become normal. Jessy is a successful artist who also works in a mailroom. Her mother has documented her life since the end of Seige, showing Jessy's progression, consistancies, systems and obsessions. This book portrays autism neither negatively or postively; it portrays Jessy as neither better or worse off than other people, being both handicapped and gifted. It should be enjoyable to anyone with any opinions(as well as to those without opinions). Happy reading.
Biblio Files Month 12 Books Reviewed:36 Total Books Reviewed:276 Days Blogged/Days In Period:16/31 New Members:KKydland, who will post later Total Number of Members:3 active Number of Hits This Data Period:235 Toal Number of Hits:2011 Features Added: none Comments: Biblio Files is one year old. I got the title to show up by placing an above it on the template. Now the banner covers the ad instead of the title.
Edgar & Ellen are twins living by themselves next to Nod's Limbs graveyard/junkyard. They find out that the mayor is planning to invite VIPs to get them to endorse Nod's Limb when he comes into their junkyard with plans to build a hotel. Edgar and Ellen decide to sabotage the mayor's efforts by scaring off the VIPs. This book is similiar in character to Lemony Snickett's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Happy reading.
When Keisha is called to the office, she expects to be informed that she has been accepted to Avery college's medical program for honor students. Instead she finds tthat she is being sent to a summer program for at-risk kids run by very smug and superior whites, and that she is no longer eligible for Avery's scholarship. From the group of kids being sent from her school, Keisha makes friends with Betty(and gets a crush on Betty's brother). When the camp goes to the beach, Betty almost drowns, and the lifeguard refuses to try to save her. The campers know that this is because Betty is black. Keisha learns from this experience: she learns that she needs to know how to swim, because blacks have to know how to rescue their own drowning. Keisha and Betty join a pool, and then a swim team. Keisha finds that she is an awesome swimmer, and she wins at all of her meets. But then Betty starts to date the neighborhood drug dealer and all-around lowlife, Keisha's mother has a suspicious amount of money for someone who's just been laid off, and Keisha has to grapple with all of the parts of her life. This books is narrated by Keisha in AAVE. It deals with the challenges facing those in poor black neighborhoods on their way to education and success. Recommended reading.
Who In Hell...: A Guide to the Whole Damned Bunch by Sean Kelly & Rosemary Rogers
Dante wrote his Inferno about 700 years ago, warning of the hells that await sinners. His hells captivated the imagination of many, who wrote their own. By Dante's standards, almost everyone after his time should be in hell; Who In Hell is a directory of the better known residents of hell. These are drawn from three catagories: devils(from numerous religions), humans reported to be in hell by Dante, Homer, or any *expert* on the topic, and a miscelleny of infamous historical characters. Who In Hell is one of the only books I've read whose cover claims it is Humor/ Reference. Reading this book without a humorous attitude could result in an offended reader; remember that this is in the spirit of fun. The ideology is mostly Catholic, and the material taken from other religions is generally not a mainstreamed idea. It contains numerous pictures. Fun reading.
At the urging of his friend Gip, Thomas goes onto his fathers computer and looks at his files. He is surprised to see an encoded document. When the boys present the document to their math teacher to solve. While waiting, Thomas follows his parents when they go on a business trip, and finds that his sister and her boyfriend are headed to the same place. There he sees something mystical and experiences something weird. He knows his family is hiding something. Then the teacher comes thorugh; the document is Thomas' adoption certificate. Thomas is furious with his parents for their deception. But Thomas soon finds that their deception is even greater. He must make desicions which will affect all of humanity. The book isn't really as dramatic as that last bit makes it sound. It's a serious look at what it means to be human. It is an accurate presentation of the view that one person might have, although not necessarily what humans are. Question: Is freedom more important than safety? Or peace? Happy reading.
Reading By The Colors Overcoming Dyslexia and Other Reading Disabilities Through The Irlen Method by Helen Irlen
The Irlen method is the use of color filters to correct Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome. People with SSS interpret colors differently, i.e. their brains see certain colors as far brighter than others. This causes extreme sensitivity to light, poor depth perception, and the inability to read black letters on white paper. Irlen was working with adults with reading difficulties when one showed improvement with a colored sheet the student had accidentally stumbled upon. Irlen started working with filters and the Irlen Method was born. Irlen estimates that about 12% of the general population has SSS to some degree, and that 2/3rds of dyslexics have SSS. She goes over how and why SSS makes it difficult and painful to read, and how it compounds dyslexia. Finally she explains what differences the Irlen Method makes. This book was written in 1991: currently more research has been done on the topic. I suggest taking a look at the website(link is above). An insert is included where the pages are colored, but I do not think that this would be useful to those with SSS as these pages reflect light far too well. In fact, the pages that the general text of this book is printed on has too much glare. Happy reading.
No One Saw My Pain: Why Teens Kill Themselves by Andrew Slaby & Lili Frank Garfinkel
Slaby is a psychiatrist who works with survivors of suicides; he works with the families of people who kill themselves. Of the case studies shown here, not all of the suicides were teen suicides. Some were older and one was younger. Slaby speculates on what places certain people at risk, why they kill themselves, and whether anything can be done about it. One of the most unusual opinions Slaby holds is that anorexia is an expression of depression. He makes a very good case for this, using as support a case of an anorexic woman who commits suicide. Serious reading.
Demystifying the Autistic Experience A Humanistic Introduction for Parents, Caregivers and Educators
by William Stillman
People with autism are humans. Their feelings are just as valid as those of anyone else. They should be helped to communicate as fully as possible, in a manner that will work in as many situations as possible. Their special interests should be encouraged and used to educate them about the whole world, rather than stifled. People with autism are also vulnerable to the same mental illnesses that other people are; in fact, they appear to be more vulnerable. These problems should not be attributed to autism.
William Stillman is an autism consultant with self-diagnosed Asperger Syndrome. His special interest is The Wizard of Oz, which has worked for him; he has been hired to work on Oz projects which use his vast knowledge on the subject. He believes in person-first language(that means saying person with autism instead of autist, person with Asperger's instead of Aspie). Stillman has a unique humanistic approach. He accepts almost all parts of autism; strangely, he sees stimming as demeaning.
Happy reading.
After his father beat him, coming dangerously close to taking his life, Ward takes no chances. To avoid his father's future rage, Ward hides under the guise of an imbecile, letting all think that his father has beat the sense out of him, and reassuring his father that he is no longer a contender for his father's throne. Seven years later, when Ward is 19 and quite established as a simpleton, his father dies. Ward is declared both too young and too stupid to hold Hurog. To prove himself, Ward runs off to do battle. With him are an odd cast of magical characters. They face evil, but Ward has to face himself and his own desire for power.
The plot was easy to follow, unusual in a book with its own politics. It had magic, central to the theme, but not overshadowing it. Characters were mostly good and bad. But Ward's presentation of a simpleton is not believable. Two of the nastiest characters in this book are also the only two homosexual characters; do I smell homophobia?
Question: In one scene, Ward kills a severely injured enemy, to end his agony. Is this moral? Would you have the strenghth to kill an injured animal('cause I don't want to get into human morality) who was going to die?
Happy reading.
Don't Think About Monkeys Extraordinary Stories
Written By People With Tourette Syndrome
edited by Adam Ward Seligman & John S. Hilkevich
Tourette Syndrome is a neurological disorder which compels its victims to make repetitive, involuntary tics. These tics can be vocal, motor, and mental, and they change their victims lives. Touretters who are adults as of this book's writing(1992) were in the generation which was mostly misdiagnosed and misunderstood. Those of a more recent generation are diagnosed earlier and with fewer previous misdiagnoses. They are subject to less abuse from their peers. But all of the Touretters in this story are their own individuals, and all have suffered not only from their disabilities, but from society's rejection. Adam DePrince, whose Tourette's is so severe and was accompanied by such early onset that he was first diagnosed with autism, writes that Tourettes is not a cute disorder. Where as people with Spina Bifida or deafness can be seen as cute, he writes, there is little patience or understanding for those with Tourette's. In this book, fourteen people(including the editors), write about the difficulties and differences Tourette's has put in their lives. They write about the physical havoc tics have wreaked on their bodies, the ostracism they suffered, the medications which sometimes helped and sometimes didn't, co-morbid disorders of depression, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and ADD. Some see their Tourettes as being separate from who they are and some do not; some see Tourettes as a blessing and a curse, and some see only a curse. These perspectives also include worldviews which are not obviously attributable to Tourette's.
Happy/serious reading.
Past, Perfect, Present Tense New and Collected Stories
by Richard Peck
Richard Peck has been writing short stories and novels for thirty years. Short stories, he says, are harder to write than are novels; all of the words have to be important. The author divides his short stories into three categories; those set in the past, those with a supernatural aspect that bridge time, and those set in the present. After an introduction to his writing in general and his first ever short story, the author presents each of these types of stories and then gives four examples. He concludes with writing tips. Two of these stories were previously unpublished, and if you are a voracious reader, you will have probably read a few of the stories before. All of the stories contain an element of surprise, so that knowing the ending makes the story a bit different, but these are worth rereading, especially if you didn't reread them immediately the first time. The introductions are not exclusively about the stories included here, and do not give away any of the surprises.
Happy reading.
The Secret Epidemic The Story of AIDS and Black America
by Jacob Levenson
When AIDS first broke out, it was seen as a Gay Related Immune Deficiency, and so gay white men where the people who mobilized and the people who received aid. But the infection rate of blacks in America is more than seven times that of whites. The spread of AIDS is spurred not only by drugs like heroin, which are injected with needles that are often contaminated, but also by drugs such as cocaine, whose users are compelled towards promiscuity.
The treatment of AIDS within the black community is hampered from many directions. Funding for treatment is directed disproportionately at those areas which had large numbers of AIDS cases fifteen years ago, as well as at cities, leaving those in rural areas underfunded. Stigma is attached to AIDS due to its association with drugs and gays, and in religious and homophobic communities, members are loath to acknowledge their infection. Blacks do not want to go to clinics associated with gays. The federal government refuses to fund a needle exchange program.
This book opens with the story of two teenagers in rural Alabama who find out that they have AIDS through their rejection from a blood donation program. That chapter is followed by one about the integration of a program on AIDS studies, followed by another case history of a woman who contracts AIDS. Moving in a manner akin to a suspense novel, Levenson shows us people with AIDS, the people related to them, their caseworkers, the factors involved in the spread of AIDS, and the politics related to race and to AIDS.
Serious reading.
