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Mrs. Beaton's Question: My Nine Years at the Halifax School for the Blind
By Robert Mercer. 2020
?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 that he discovered his voice, a voice he uses to recount his remarkable journey from a shy little boy to a community leader.
Westray: Mon passage des ténèbres à la lumière
By Vernon Theriault. 2019
Dans ce livre, Theriault décrit son expérience dans la mine du comté de Pictou, ses combats personnels à la suite…
du désastre et la façon dont il a donné un sens nouveau à sa vie en participant à la campagne de lobbying de longue haleine du Syndicat des Métallos, qui a mené à l’adoption de la Loi Westray en 2004.
Life's Not over, It Just Looks Different
By Christopher Warner. 2016
Life happens, and sometimes it changes in ways that we never expected.After experiencing a surgical complication that rendered me legally…
blind, I decided there were two choices ahead of me: roll over and die, essentially giving in to the fact that life wasn't going to be the same as before, or get on with life and figure out how to move forward with reduced eyesight.This book shares a personal story of trying to bounce back from a life changing event. There were lots of good days and even some funny moments along the way. But no recovery is ever all smooth sailing. There were also bad days, and times when self-doubt and despair took over.
Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body
By Rebekah Taussig. 2020
A memoir-in-essays from disability advocate and creator of the Instagram account @sitting_pretty Rebekah Taussig, processing a lifetime of memories to…
paint a beautiful, nuanced portrait of a body that looks and moves differently than most.Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Rebekah Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), inspirational (Helen Keller), or angelic (Forrest Gump). None of this felt right; and as she got older, she longed for more stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling.Writing about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn’t fit, Rebekah reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life. Disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one point or another. By exploring this truth in poignant and lyrical essays, Taussig illustrates the need for more stories and more voices to understand the diversity of humanity. Sitting Pretty challenges us as a society to be patient and vigilant, practical and imaginative, kind and relentless, as we set to work to write an entirely different story.
Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space
By Amanda Leduc. 2020
Fairy tales shape how we see the world, so what happens when you identify more with the Beast than Beauty?…
If every disabled character is mocked and mistreated, how does the Beast ever imagine a happily-ever-after? Amanda Leduc looks at fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm to Disney, showing us how they influence our expectations and behaviour and linking the quest for disability rights to new kinds of stories that celebrate difference. ‘Leduc peels the flesh from the fairy tales we grew up loving and strips them down to their skeletons to skilfully reveal how they influence the way we think about disability. She contrasts the stories we have with the ones we wish we had, incorporating her own life. Her wisdom lands like a punch in the heart, leaving a sizable dent that reshapes how we see tales we’ve been telling for centuries. She also – and this is the best part – suggests how we might tell new fairy tales, how we can forge new stories.’ – Adam Pottle, author of Voice ‘A unique and dazzling study … a revolutionary approach to understanding why we are drawn to fairy tales and how they shape our lives.’ – Jack Zipes, author of Grimm Legacies ‘Each chapter is a gem, but the kind of gem that turns into a knife, into a mirror, into a portal. Leduc’s real magic? That she transforms her readers as surely as any world.’ – Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk
Falling for myself: a memoir /
By Dorothy Ellen Palmer. 2019
Born with congenital anomalies in both feet, then called birth defects, Dorothy Ellen Palmer was adopted as a toddler by…
a wounded 1950s family who had no idea how to handle the tangled complexities of adoption and disability. From repeated childhood surgeries to an activist awakening at university to decades as a feminist teacher, mom, improv coach and unionist, she tried to hide being different. But now, standing proud with her walker, she's sharing her journey. Navigating abandonment, abuse and ableism, she finds her birth parents and a new chosen family in the disability community. 2019.
Beryl: The Making of a Disability Activist
By Dustin Galer. 2023
The story of a mid-century working-class housewife whose extraordinary physical transformation empowered her to become a dynamic social activist who…
fueled a movement to create a more inclusive future for people with disabilities.
Beryl: The Making of a Disability Activist
By Dustin Galer. 2023
The story of a mid-century working-class housewife whose extraordinary physical transformation empowered her to become a dynamic social activist who…
fueled a movement to create a more inclusive future for people with disabilities.
"This is the personal memoir of blind lawyer and volunteer disability rights advocate David Lepofsky. It describes his involvement in…
and perspectives on the successful fight from 1980 to 1982 to get Canada’s proposed Charter of Rights amended to guarantee equal rights for people with disabilities. It includes a foreword by the Hon. Rosalie Abella, former Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. This memoir recounts the little-known saga of the disability amendment to the Charter. Few know that equality for people with disabilities was the only constitutional right added to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms during the widely publicized 18-month battle over the patriation of Canada’s Constitution, from October 1980 to April 1982. It is aimed at anyone interested in disability rights, human rights, Canadian political or legal history, social justice advocacy, and Canadian constitutional law. It provides a mix of legal and legislative history, personal autobiography, grassroots advocacy strategy and reflective commentary on lessons learned. It compares social justice advocacy techniques in 1980 to those practiced in the disability rights arena four decades later."
"I lost everything that mattered in my life because I went Deaf and Blind. It was then, in the depths…
of challenges, that I found salvations. It took my disabilities to help me realize what an incredible life I could lead. Sport. Philanthropy. Storytelling. This book is about reaffirming that anyone and everyone needs to know anything is possible and no matter how tough things get, there is always going to be another tomorrow." -- cover.
I don't do disability and other lies i've told myself
By Adelle Purdham. 2024
"A tender, beautifully written essay collection that is about so much more than parenting a child with a disability." —…
Erin Pepler, author of Send Me Into The Woods Alone A raw and intimate portrait of family, love, life, relationships, and disability parenting through the eyes of a mother to a daughter with Down syndrome. With the arrival of her daughter with Down syndrome, Adelle Purdham began unpacking a lifetime of her own ableism. In a society where people with disabilities remain largely invisible, what does it mean to parent such a child? And simultaneously, what does it mean as a mother, a writer, and a woman to truly be seen? The candid essays in I Don't Do Disability and Other Lies I've Told Myself glimmer with humanity and passion, and explore ideas of motherhood, disability, and worth. Purdham delves into grief, rage, injustice, privilege, female friendship, marriage, and desire in a voice that is loudly empathetic, unapologetic, and true. While examining the dichotomies inside of herself, she leads us to consider the flaws in society, showing us the beauty, resilience, chaos, and wild within us all
Fallosophy: my trip through life with MS : a memoir
By Ardra Shephard. 2025
"A memoir based on columnist, fashion-show TV host, podcaster and MS advocate Ardra Shephard's award-winning blog, Tripping on Air. Twenty-three-year-old…
Ardra Shephard is sleeping with the wrong guy, living in a crappy apartment, and spending money she doesn't have on designer shoes, boozy brunches and weekends in NYC. She hates her office job, but it pays for the lessons she needs to make it as an opera singer. She isn't thrilled about her current situation, but she isn't panicked. She knows she's got time! Making mistakes while you figure stuff out is what your twenties are all about. But then when a doctor tells Ardra she has MS, those two letters split her life into a Before and After. While over a million people in Canada and the United States live with Multiple Sclerosis, there is no certainty when it comes to the progression of the disease. By her mid-thirties, Ardra is struggling to walk, and it's terrifying. When she starts using mobility aids, she faces feelings of otherness and not belonging like never before. As Ardra's deepest fears keep coming true, she starts to learn the most important lesson: She's been sold a lie about disability--it isn't a fate worse than death. Having so far survived all of her worst-case scenarios, she begins to realize that a difficult life doesn't have to be a joyless life. Today, twenty years after her diagnosis, Ardra's journey isn't over. MS will always be a force to be reckoned with, but the woman Ardra is, day after day, is no longer negotiable. Fallosophy serves up wisdom like a seasoned bartender who's seen it all, and doesn't try to sugarcoat what it's really like to live with a progressive, disabling illness in a world that would rather not build a ramp."
It must be beautiful to be finished: a memoir of my body
By Kate Gies. 2025
"When Kate Gies was four years old, a plastic surgeon pressed a synthetic ear to the right side of her…
head and pulled out a mirror. He told her he could make her "whole"--could make her "right"--and she believed him. From the age of four to thirteen, she underwent fourteen surgeries, including skin and bone grafts, to craft the appearance of an outer ear. Many of the surgeries failed, leaving permanent damage to her body. In short, lyrical vignettes, Kate writes about how her "disfigured" body was scrutinized, pathologized, and even weaponized. She describes the physical and psychic trauma of medical intervention, and its effects on her sense of self, first as a child needing to be fixed, and later, as a teenager and adult, navigating the complex expectations and dangers of being a woman. It Must Be Beautiful to Be Finished is the story of a girl desperately trying to have a body that makes her acceptable and of a woman learning to own a body she never felt was hers to define. In an age of speaking out about the abuse of marginalized bodies, this memoir takes a hard look at the medical system's role in body oppression and trauma."
Her Name Was Margaret: Life and Death on the Streets
By Denise Davy. 2021
At age eighteen, Margaret Jacobson was admitted to the Ontario Hospital, later renamed the Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital. Years later, she…
died homeless and alone in the city. With meticulous research and deep compassion Denise Davy has pieced together Margaret's story – from promising student to patient, to homeless woman, to an unmarked grave – and asks us to look hard at the system that buried her there.
Ugly
By Robert Hoge. 2015
A beaut story about one very ugly kid.Robert Hoge was born with a tumour in the middle of his face,…
and legs that weren't much use. There wasn't another baby like him in the whole of Australia, let alone Brisbane. But the rest of his life wasn't so unusual: he had a mum and a dad, brothers and sisters, friends at school and in his street. He had childhood scrapes and days at the beach; fights with his family and trouble with his teachers.He had doctors, too: lots of doctors who, when he was still very young, removed that tumour from his face and operated on his legs, then stitched him back together. He still looked different, though. He still looked ... ugly.UGLY is the true story of how an extraordinary boy grew up to have an ordinary life, and how that became his greatest achievement of all.
Helen Keller (Rebel Lives)
By Helen Keller, John Davis. 2003
A different portrayal of Keller, who is usually remembered for her work aiding blind and deaf-blind people. Deaf and blind…
herself from the age of 19 months, Keller did indeed devote her adult life to helping those similarly afflicted - she was also a crusading Socialist, championing the poor and oppressed from all walks of life and leading a fight against the less obvious evil of social blindness. John Davis has collected her political writing and speeches, including her arguments for women's suffrage, her opposition to the world wars and support for Eugene V. Debs.
Easy Street: A Story of Redemption from Myself
By Maggie Rowe. 2022
A moving and offbeat story of unlikely friendship, the cost of ambition, and what happens when the things you&’ve always…
run away from show up on your doorstep. To most, Maggie Rowe appears to live on Easy Street. Her stylish home is in a fashionable Los Angeles neighborhood. She has a kind husband who makes her laugh. And after years of struggle, she is finally making a name for herself in Hollywood. But the agreeable, confident persona she presents to the world often feels like a deception to Maggie, who&’s long grappled with mental illness and feelings of inadequacy. Enter Joanna Hergert, a neurodiverse middle-aged woman who lives with her elderly mother. Maggie&’s husband, Jim, introduces her to the pair after meeting them at a local charbroiled chicken franchise. Over the next several years, she forms a friendship with Joanna and her mother—despite Joanna&’s robust romantic fixation on Jim. What begins as a mild curiosity soon blooms into a complicated and intimate friendship that will challenge Maggie to confront her mental health issues and the trade-offs she&’s made to live life on her own terms. Engrossing, moving, and wickedly funny, Easy Street is a midlife coming-of-age buddy comedy about embracing the strength of the families we fashion, finding peace with the choices we make, and, above all, learning to be compassionate with ourselves.
Facing the Music: a Broadway memoir
By David Loud. 2022
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!&“&‘Music has consequences,&’ a wise teacher once told a young David Loud; so does a story well-told and a life fully-lived. I lost count of how many times I laughed, cried, and laugh-cried reading this wonderful, wry, intimate, and inspiring book. David wields a pen like he wields a baton, with perfect timing, exquisite phrasing, and enormous heart.&” — David Hyde Pierce, actor, Frasier, Spamalot, Curtains &“Beautifully written, filled with vivid details, braided with love and loss and wit and the perspective of someone with an utterly unique story to tell." -- Lynn Ahrens, lyricist, Ragtime, Once on This Island, Anastasia &“Luminous and surprising, an extremely honest memoir of a life lived in the world of Broadway musicals, by one of the theatre&’s most gifted conductors. I can&’t think of another book quite like it.&” -- John Kander, composer, Cabaret, Chicago, New York, New York Unforgettably entertaining and emotionally revealing, Loud is pitch-perfect as he describes his path to the podium, from a stage-struck kid growing up at a school devoted to organic farming and mountain climbing, to the searing formative challenges he faces during adolescence, to the remarkable behind-the-scenes stories of his Broadway trials and triumphs. Skilled at masking his fears, Loud achieves his dream until one fateful opening night, when in the midst of a merry, dressing room celebration, he can no longer deny reality and must suddenly, truly, face the music.
Easy Beauty: A Memoir
By Chloé Cooper Jones. 2022
From Chloé Cooper Jones—Pulitzer Prize finalist, philosophy professor, Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient—a groundbreaking memoir about disability, motherhood, and a…
journey to far-flung places in search of a new way of seeing and being seen. “I am in a bar in Brooklyn, listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether my life is worth living.” So begins Chloé Cooper Jones’s bold, revealing account of moving through the world in a body that looks different than most. Jones learned early on to factor “pain calculations” into every plan, every situation. Born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis which affects both her stature and gait, her pain is physical. But there is also the pain of being judged and pitied for her appearance, of being dismissed as “less than.” The way she has been seen—or not seen—has informed her lens on the world her entire life. She resisted this reality by excelling academically and retreating to “the neutral room in her mind” until it passed. But after unexpectedly becoming a mother (in violation of unspoken social taboos about the disabled body), something in her shifts, and Jones sets off on a journey across the globe, reclaiming the spaces she’d been denied, and denied herself. From the bars and domestic spaces of her life in Brooklyn to sculpture gardens in Rome; from film festivals in Utah to a Beyoncé concert in Milan; from a tennis tournament in California to the Killing Fields of Phnom Penh, Jones weaves memory, observation, experience, and aesthetic philosophy to probe the myths underlying our standards of beauty and desirability, and interrogates her own complicity in upholding those myths. With its emotional depth, its prodigious, spiky intelligence, its passion and humor, Easy Beauty is the rare memoir that has the power to make you see the world, and your place in it, with new eyes.
Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up
By Selma Blair. 2022
Selma Blair has played many roles: Ingenue in Cruel Intentions. Preppy ice queen in Legally Blonde. Muse to Karl Lagerfeld.…
Advocate for the multiple sclerosis community. But before all of that, Selma was known best as … a mean baby. In a memoir that is as wildly funny as it is emotionally shattering, Blair tells the captivating story of growing up and finding her truth. The first story Selma Blair Beitner ever heard about herself is that she was a mean, mean baby. With her mouth pulled in a perpetual snarl and a head so furry it had to be rubbed to make way for her forehead, Selma spent years living up to her terrible reputation: biting her sisters, lying spontaneously, getting drunk from Passover wine at the age of seven, and behaving dramatically so that she would be the center of attention. Although Selma went on to become a celebrated Hollywood actress and model, she could never quite shake the periods of darkness that overtook her, the certainty that there was a great mystery at the heart of her life. She often felt like her arms might be on fire, a sensation not unlike electric shocks, and she secretly drank to escape. Over the course of this beautiful and, at times, devasting memoir, Selma lays bare her addiction to alcohol, her devotion to her brilliant and complicated mother, and the moments she flirted with death. There is brutal violence, passionate love, true friendship, the gift of motherhood, and, finally, the surprising salvation of a multiple sclerosis diagnosis. In a voice that is powerfully original, fiercely intelligent, and full of hard-won wisdom, Selma Blair’s Mean Baby is a deeply human memoir and a true literary achievement. New York Times Bestseller