Disabled Books

I bought this to help find places my husband and I can go for short 2-3 day holidays. This book has a lot of information about barriers that most able-bodied people take for granted - ie, gravel walkways vs hard surface, etc. It's divided by regions so you can easily find whatever is available in any given area - for example: Horse& buggy rides with lock-downs for wheelchairs, ramps into pools, accessible rental condos, fishing trips, accessible canoeing, water parks with ramps etc. This will be put to very good use this year!! No excuses now!

I was a little reluctant at first to purchase this book because of the price and being disappointed in another access guide I had purchased. Also, I don't use a wheelchair on a regular basis. After reading a review, I decided to give it a try and I am so glad I did. Its detailed descriptions of the tourist attractions made it easy for me to decide if the attraction would meet my needs. I never realized how many activities were available for those who use wheelchairs. It opened my eyes to so many things I had not even thought about doing. And the accommodations listed are not just motels! The list includes campgrounds, cabins, B & B's, houses, condos, even houseboats and an RV. There is also an appendix chock full of helpful resources. Thank you Wheelchairs on the Go. This book is a real gift to the disabled community and a bargain at twice the price!

Wheelchairs on the Go: Accessible Fun in Florida (by Michelle Stigleman & Deborah Van Brunt, 424 pages, ISBN: 9664356-5-6 , USA: $24.95) is a comprehensive guide for any resident or traveler with ambulatory difficulties who would like to have fun in Florida. Michelle and Deborah have covered hundreds of locations and listed the available aids and pitfalls for challenged travelers. You can look up any city or any activity and learn how to adjust or plan your travels, or whether it is not advisable for those with limitations. The authors list so many aids and so many fun activities that anyone who has hesitated to travel because of physical disabilities will want to make Florida a top destination. Every kind of fun activity and attraction is covered, describing the potential barriers and how to overcome them. An EXCELLENT guide book for those who need it, including people who use canes and walkers, or simply can't walk very far. Additions and updates to the book will be posted

"When Your Child Has a Disability" is the complete handbook needed for every parent with a disabled child.The book provides assurance to parents that they are not alone,while giving answers to commonly asked questions.The information provided enables parents to act as the child's advocate without fear.The book is easily understood and gives advice without frightening parents that they may not have the power or education necessary to fight for the child's well-being.Every parent of a disabled child should have this book as a reference.

If you are the parent of a child who has multiple special needs or are looking for a scholarly and readable introduction to children's disabilities, then When Your Child Has a Disability is a "must read" resource. Relevant and reliable, it is the most comprehensive overview for parents of special needs children that has been published to date.

A well rounded resource like this has been needed for parents for a long time, and Dr. Batshaw has done an remarkable job at fulfilling this need. Crucial topics are covered which are rarely addressed adequately, but are vital to children with special needs - for example, feeding, visual impairment, teeth and dental care.

As moderator of mailing lists on Adoption (from Vietnam) and Prematurity, it is rare that I can recommend a book for both groups, but this is one that meets the needs of many parents.

When Your Child Has a Disability covers four major areas - Getting the Diagnosis, Growing Up with a Disability, Developmental Disabilities, and a brief section called What the Future Holds. Each chapter in these sections is authored by an experienced practitioner in the field. They provide an concise overview for each subject, an explanation of the terminology, and a number of practical suggestions for your child.

The section on Growing Up with a Disability covers topics vital to parents of children with special needs, such as nutrition and feeding, dental care, and encouraging appropriate behavior. Specific disabilities are covered in the Developmental Disability section, including many disabilities linked to prematurity. Twelve developmental disabilities are addressed - cerebral palsy, hearing loss, autism, mental retardation, visual impairment, communication disorders, learning disorders, down syndrome, genetic syndromes, spina bifida, and epilepsy.

For parents of children who have special needs (or are "at risk" for developmental disabilities), When Your Child Has a Disability is invaluable. . No other book comes close for educated, practical coverage of developmental disabilities, and accompanying special needs, in children.

As a parent of a child with a disability, I found in this book some of the best information and advice that I have read on the subject of children with disabilities. While some chapters deal with specific disabilities, others provide more general valuable information for all parents of children with disabilities (e.g. how to deal with emotions, managing the relationships with medical professionals, the education process, legal rights and how to care for your child throughout his/her lifetime).

The book provides sound expert advice to all parents of a child with a disability - from choosing and visiting doctors to communicating with and feeding your child to dealing with common and not-so-common medical problems to understanding legal and educational rights and benefits. That advice will help parents to appropriately act on behalf of the child. While providing critical information on caring for your child, the authors let parents know that the parents are in charge because nobody knows our children better. The knowlegde from this book will empower parents to do what they believe is in the best interest of the child.

This book is a signifcant resource and a "must read" for any parent of a child with a disability. I suggest not only reading the book, but also keeping it close as a valuable reference tool.

I received the book promptly. The material was in new condition without any flaws. I was very pleased. Thank you!

She tries to help you understand the reality of her life. It is much more than you can imagine.

What beautiful writing! It's pointed out in the intro that, more than most of us, her world was shaped with WORDS. I've only read about four essays so far, and am profoundly touched. I've always admired Helen Keller, but am newly re-impressed with her wisdom and vision, and touched that she can write so clearly as to make me feel how little she felt limited by her handicap. If Helen Keller had simply learned to behave and ask politely for her food, etc, it would have been an impressive accomplishment. The fact that she grew to fully embrace her intelligence, her world and her potential . . . wow. I know so many people who are content to just do the bare minimum, to not stretch their limits at all, to not show any intellectual curiosity . . . she had the perfect excuse to exert the least effort, yet she didn't. Once she was given the key, the entree to humanity, she didn't let her handicaps stop her. I love that even all these years later, she is still able to share that.

If I could have only one book on teaching writing, Writing Better: Effective Strategies For Teaching Students With Learning Difficulties would be that book. Steve Graham and Karen Harris not only can research, but they also can write with clarity, flair, and humor.

Any teacher or homeschooler who wants students to be more independent can profit from their strategies for enabling students to learn to monitor their own performance.

The research and strategies Graham and Harris discuss were primarily tested at the middle school level. However, I have used them successfully at the college level with students who were not learning disabled. The authors' recommendations are practical, down-to-earth, and clear enough that any anyone can use and adapt them to a wide range of student populations. They need not be limited to special education.

Linda Aragoni
www.you-can-teach-writing.com

Special Education professors Steve Graham, Ed.D. and Karen Harris, Ed.D. combine their talents in Writing Better: Effective Strategies For Teaching Students With Learning Difficulties, a methodical and practical guide for educators. Chapters address genre specific writing strategies, paragraph-writing, goal-setting, brainstorming and other strategies, ways of fostering self-monitoring and self-regulating writing skills, and more. An invaluable, practical resource that explains its ideas in depth with boxed tips and numerous examples, supported heavily with research and classroom experience.

This is also an excellent resource as I am writing a thesis on self-regulated strategy instruction in the area of written language

Packed with brand new material in this updated and expanded second edition, "The ABCs of Learning Disabilities" is now available in a second edition that improves upon the first in every way. Covering the history of disabilities by academic subject, the new edition sports an informative introduction to learning disabilities, how to diagnose them in students, a new chapter on self-regulation, and much more. "The ABCs of Learning Disabilities" is a must for every educational professional who and wants to educate learning disabled students in the most efficient and effective way possible.

Wong really goes in depth in simple language and crucial research that involves Learning Disability. She really writes so that everyone who have never heard of LD can understand. She goes through different aspects of LD. It's a recommended book for those who have no idea what learning disability is and to those who are professional in the schools. A true 5 star.

This is a great way to keep kids from being left behind. Many years ago, there was more of a focus on visual memory and more kids were better readers. It isn't the best technique for everyone. Yes, some kids do not learn best by this method but most kids do! Be sure to get another book by the same author also.

Learning Disabilities: There is a Cure--A Guide for Parents, Educators and Physicians

These books are good to use with the free lesson plan about recognizing similarities and differences on The Learning Abilities Books website.

My daughter, who just entered second grade this September, has been receiving instruction with the Achieve: A Visual Memory Program. Last spring she started the program barely able to recall a three letter word. Her sight vocabulary was very weak and she struggled with a simple first grade reader. In just a few months of instruction with this program she is already working in the second level book! She has increased her visual memory span to a six letter level and is now reading two syllable words easily. She gets very excited about the program and begs to have her tutor go through more cards than were planned. We can see that she is proud of her accomplishment in this program and is much more confident in her reading. This is a great teaching tool.

This book took the typical behaviors of ADHD kids, broke them down, and made separate and specific recommendations. They are very realistic and applicable in the general classroom. I recommend it for general ed. and special ed. teachers alike.

I found this book to be to the point. As a teacher and a mother of a child with ADHD, I found excellent ideas to try with my child and at school. I liked to brevity of this book. I did not have to read pages to obtain some simple, but fantastic ideas to use with our ADHD kids.

Having read more than 30 books on ADHD, I have found this one to be one of the best. It provides an excellent resource for understanding and diagnosing ADHD, as well as "overlapping" disorders, like ODD, and Conduct Disorder. This book is easy to read for parents, but probably a good book even for professionals who may be unfamiliar with the basics of this disorder. There is also a detailed section on treatment, including behavior management and medication. A very timely section covers obtaining special school services and classroom techniques for teachers. If you don't have any books yet on ADHD, this is a great one to start with and keep as a resource in your home library.

I have read over 10 books about ADHD. After you finally face that your child has ADHD you want to know how to help.

This book clearly explains how ADHD is addressed under IDEA and the 504 plan and how an IEP (Individual Educational Plan) fits is associated with both the IDEA and 504. It also gives recommendations about how to best use the IEP to your childs advantage.

This book also provides information about behavior modification. It explains what it is and how it works. This information should be helpful to any parent of an ADHDer.

There is also a chapter about "Classroom Techniques" that suggests some things that teachers can do to help the ADHD child be more successful and less disruptive in school. I will use the information in this chapter to help develop my child's IEP. I will also buy another copy of this book to give to my child's teacher and I'll put an amazon book mark at this chapter!

In summary, it's one of the most useful books about ADHD I've read. Get one for yourself and one for your child's teacher.

As an advocate and teacher educator, I have given away more copies of this book than I can count. Mary Falvey has created a resource that is not only user-friendly but based in research and focused on best practice in K-12 schools. It covers IEPs, assessment, curricular adaptations and more. Essential!

Author Mary Falvey's advice is so cutting edge, sensitive, practical, and visionary. She fully understands inclusive education from preschool through postsecondary options and beyond, to life in inclusive communities. Mary is personally and professionally connected to those individuals with the most significant disabilities. She shares information on to promote your child's access to the general curriculum, how to get the school to use appropriate modifications and assessment strategies, how to encourage friendships, how to work collaboratively with the school, how to problem solve, and what your legal rights are. To keep current as a special education attorney, I have read over a hundred books in this field. Believe In My Child will join the ranks of the small handful of books I recommend to my clients.

From Jack Trombadore Book Reviews New Jersey Polio Network
NEWSLETTER, Fall, 1998.

In this collection of essays, journals, writings and personal recollections spanning almost half a century, Hugh Gallagher courageously reveals himself in a compelling autobiography as both protagonist and antagonist in a drama with countless scenes in three acts. Throughout the first two acts he forces himself to overcome the role of emotional anti-hero until he achieves final freedom from the talons of clinical depression at the beginning of a long, ongoing and productive third act.

Stricken with severe paralytic polio at nineteen, Gallagher never walked again. A freshman at Haverford in the spring of 1952, he was young, beautiful and free; he was in love with a beautiful girl, the novels of Thomas Mann, Italian opera, politics, and with life. He was young, strong and invincible.

Polio, My Account, was written twenty years "after the event" and never previously published. Here, he tells us what it "felt" like to have had a life sentence of disability imposed without hope of pardon or parole. The physiological aspects of his polio were just representative of the inward tragedy of the collapse of a young life. He saw himself watching his own deterioration from outside his body. He saw the horrific progression of the disease the first days: legs, trunk, breathing, arms, hands, neck, double and quadruple vision, the tracheotomy on a body too weak for anesthetics, the rush down corridors in the arms of non-medical personnel to the iron lung, the108 degree fever, last rites.

His body was the battlefield for the doctors and his presence was "accidental." No one disclosed what his ravaged body would be like if they succeeded in keeping him alive. The overwhelming question became: stop or go, yes or no, live or die. He decided to live.

After a year in hospitals, he was admitted to the Warm Springs Foundation in Georgia. He spent nine months there, learning the "functional" tricks of the trade that would enable him again to live in the outside world. He was physically independent, healthy and in a wheelchair. He still is.

He obtained his American B.A. in 1956 from Claremont McKenna College in California. It was the only college of the forty to which he had written that was fully accessible. His first application for a Rhodes Fellowship to Oxford was returned unprocessed; Gallagher was not "fit in mind and body" as required by the will of Cecil Rhodes. His was the first application Oxford had ever received from a disabled person. However, he did attend Oxford with a Marshall Fellow scholarship and studied there for three years at Trinity College, the only one of Oxford's thirty-five individual colleges that was "wheelchair accessible." He was the only person at Oxford in a wheelchair. There he endured unbelievable hardships.

The water closet was a block away, down a ramp and up a ramp, nearly always slippery from the constant rain. The bath facilities were inaccessible and he did not bathe or wash his hair for a year at a time. His legs turned blue from the cold and stayed blue until the late spring. Despite having acquired an outstanding education and lifelong friends, Gallagher now looks with awe and disbelief at the hardships he willingly endured in those three years.

In 1959, as a member of a senatorial staff on Capitol Hill he was once again the only person there in a wheelchair. There was no handicap parking, there were steps everywhere, and the bathrooms were not accessible.

In 1962 Gallagher began his life's work, the search for equal access and equal rights for disabled persons, when he joined the staff of Alaska's powerful, popular and supportive Senator Bob Bartlett (D. Alaska), a member of the Appropriations Committee. The Senator authorized him to work on disability issues and agreed to support this work. Gallagher drafted the Federal Architectural Barriers Act of 1968, the first legislation anywhere to treat equal access of disabled people as a civil right, and the precursor to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

One is thrilled by the account of the political maneuvering, and the political blackmail engineered by Gallagher and the ever-willing Bartlett in the Johnson years to achieve accessibility to the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, federally funded hospitals across America, and many more sites.

On Bartlett's death in 1968 Gallagher went to work for British Petroleum, Ltd., where he acted for five years as that Company's chief political officer in London and Washington. The discovery of vast oil reserves by BP on its Alaska holdings made it the holder of the largest crude reserves in America. Gallagher tells us he was playing with the "Big Boys."

On the 4th of July weekend, 1974, Gallagher left his office and never returned. He was in total mental and physical collapse and spent the rest of the decade recovering from his clinical depression. It had begun two years earlier at his 40th birthday party when he realized that "youth was past." He had been frozen with fear as he felt a giant black buzzard flapping its wings high above him. The experience was repeated in a few months. He continued working until he could no longer do so, filled with dread and unable to go out.

"The great black buzzard sat heavy on my shoulder. It would not go away." " ...the pain of acute paralytic polio in no degree equaled the agony and despair, the abject helplessness of depression." This period of Gallagher's life ended after a long and successful course of psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

Gallagher has long since assumed center stage in the Third Act of this heroic human drama, writing (FDR's Splendid Deception), traveling, speaking, and advocating nationally for the rights of the disabled. A must read.

What a wonderful honest account of the struggles of a man, Hugh Gregory Gallagher who at his peak suffered a tremendous loss as a result of polio. Yet in spite of it, and in part because Mr. Gallagher was blessed with a smart mind and strong spirit, overcame the obstacles, making a statement to society about his worth as a human being, as he pursued his dreams, then ultimately made the world a better place for thosewith disabilities. As a polio survivor and one who is facing the challenges of the late effects of post polio, I applaud Mr. Gallagher for his courage and have read and re-read his book to help me gain my strength and courage to face the challenges before me.