Specific Disabilities Books

This is a very informative book but I would get it only if you really need it. It has lots of information but is wordy and repetitive - all in all making a difficult read.

The book arrived in a timely manner and was in the condition stated by the seller.

Strengths: The information is useful and it is a good resource. I have begun to put tabs on pages for future reference.

Weaknesses: This book presents poorly, it appears to be a new printing of an old book. The material presented would be easier to take in and retain, in fewer words.

I also feel that it would make the book easier to read through if there were more visual supports, for example: charts, pictures, graphs, and internet links.

A new edition to a long series of books by M. Snell summarizing the most up-to-date information on educating children with severe developmental disabilities. A must book to have in your library if you have an interest in this population ... comprehensive, excellent references, concise presentations of content, leading authorities contributing to this edition etc.

If you are considering buying this book then you are likely a parent with a child with a learning disability. I am a parent of a child with a learning disability. I have found that I MUST advocate for my child. Entering College as a Freshman is another life transition. These life transitions can be so very difficult for these students. Students with IEPs in High School will likely need a Structured Program. "Services" will simply not be enough. "Services" require the student to seek them out. Students with learning disabilities entering college have not yet developed the maturity to be an advocate for themselves. Hence, the need for a "Program". These programs have additional fees indicating that they provide additional services not provided for students without a disability.

I like Peterson's Guide a bit more because it organizes those schools that have "Structured/Proactive Programs" from schools that simply have the services that all universities are required by federal law to provide. The Peterson Guide lists detailed information such as number of staff supporting the program, number of students enrolled, orientation, diagnostic testing, tutoring, written policies. Even if you have a copy that is a few years old you can still compare and contrast schools.

This is still an excellent guide.

This is a step by step comprehensive book that gives the steps for application, disclosure possibilities and acceptable testing formats. I highly recommend this book. It is worth the purchase price.

Because all public colleges and universities have to make reasonable accommodations for qualified students with disabilities (i.e. students who can perform the college work with minor adjustments), these guides are a waste of time, paper, and ink.

They imply that students with disabilities will only be eligible to receive accommodations at certain colleges--and those institutions are doing it as a 'favor' as opposed to this being the law.

As a person with disabilities myself who completed both her undergrad and graduate degree, I empathize with the high emotions that the prospective college students and their families might have while reading this book. I've also dealt with high school personnel who had formally discouraged me from going to college only because I had been in special education.

However, finding out federal and state laws (and remembering that your state cannot trump the federal laws with their programs) is a much more useful alternative than limiting oneself with outdated college application advice.


Yes, I dealt with a college administrator who attempted to kick me out because of my disability, but knowing my legal rights and responsibilities in the college environment made the critical difference. Subsequently that same administrator left while I went on to successfully complete my education at the same place I had initially enrolled at. Self-responsibility and advocacy is the key for an effective college experience.

If (and this is a very big if) Mary Beth Kravets and Imy Wax really wanted students with disabilities in college they would be insisting the same and providing their readership with accurate information. Shame on them for misleading people with outdated prescriptives!

I found the book to be very helpful in eliminating the schools that we were looking at without the need to visit. And also naming schools never even considered,
A wonderful guide for parents helping an ADD child to cope

Life wont stop me either,just like Anne.Painful as life might be they proved you can never give up! When is the next book due?

At the NC Writer's Network conference, I saw others pick up this book, published by Pentland Press, and found that they were just as intrigued as me by the fact the book offers a new glimpse of travel in a very difficult fashion. The book offers hope and sound advice for the senior traveler as well as a profound wealth of knowledge for the young traveler based on the experiences supplied by this couple who love travel. Each and every part of the book exmplifies their love for adventure and travel. I hope to see more writings by this author.

I found this book extremely disappointing. The title suggested one would read about the author's experiences as a wheelchair traveler, the obstacles faced, the solutions available, and the recommendations to other such travelers. Instead, the author was healthy, and although his wife had a physical impairment, she did not appear to be disabled (her activities of daily living were not restricted). She did use a wheelchair, but she was not wheelchair-dependent. The book suggested she could walk, climb steps, use normal restrooms, drive, use normal hotel rooms, and public transportation, where a truly wheelchair-dependent individual can do none of these. The book is not focused on `wheelchair travel'; just on `travel'. As such, the title is misleading to wheelchair-dependent individuals who are considering travel, as it presents a rosy picture that I do not find realistic. I am an internist who has been wheelchair-dependent for a long time, and who has also traveled considerably. I am not a pessimist; it can be done, but it requires enormous, pre-trip, homework and planning to the smallest detail, a very large checkbook, and a very strong and very, very loving companion. I just returned from two weeks in Europe and this is some of what I found:

* Transferring from your wheelchair to an aisle chair to get to and from your seat is very cumbersome and time consuming. Allow ample time for connecting flights.
* Airplanes' restrooms are not wheelchair accessible; a transatlantic flight is a real challenge in this sense. A `Foley' leg bag could help.
* My wheelchair was totally wrecked on arriving at our destination. Consider taking a backup.
* I could not find one single wheelchair accessible restroom in London's Gatwick airport. Again, consider the leg bag.
* Access to public transport such as buses, trains, and boats is extremely limited to very new ones with adequate ramps, etc. do your homework before you leave, and not on airport arrival. I frequently had to rely on limo services. Taxis are frequently reluctant to load the wheelchair in the trunk.
* There are steps everywhere and few curb cuts. A travel chair with four small wheels handles much better than your standard wheelchair.
* There are few wheelchair accessible restaurant restrooms. Do your homework.
* Wheelchair accessible hotel rooms in Europe frequently address the toilet but not the bathing facilities. Ask before booking, or bathing will be a mayor obstacle. Usually, the newer, more expensive hotels offer better facilities.
* Cruise ship gangplanks are usually in steps, impossible to manage in a wheelchair. There are bumps and lips everywhere in the floor of most ships. Again, the travel chair is helpful- not the wheelchair.
* Many of the monuments, churches, etc. are simply not accessible and you will have to limit yourself to watching from your vehicle.
* The Americans With Disabilities Act does not apply to Europe. What may be your right in America is merely a courtesy in Europe. Don't expect to be moved to the front of the line everywhere.
* Avoid arrivals at night when services are limited.

Good luck!

"Wheelchair Around the World is the Simpsons' inspirational story of how this husband and wife team fulfilled their lifelong dream to travel around the world. A light, entertaining travel log, Wheelchair Around the World is a daily account of the couple's adventures-and-misadventures-from the glorious sights they visited to the obstacles they faced due to Anne's handicap. Through stunning photos and vivid detail, Simpson teases each of our senses, beginning with images of Ireland's dazzling spray-covered Cliffs of Moher, Hawaii's breathtaking volcanoes, and the daunting height of Japan's infamous Mt. Fuji. The Simpsons' advice serves as a resourceful guide for all, yet their story exudes an addictive spirit of adventure and faith in God that makes Wheelchair Around the World a motivational, delightfully fun read." Malverne, NY National Amputation Chapter #76, Disabled American Veterans. About the Author: A resident of North Carolina, he has written travel articles for "Fifty Plus" and has served as editor and publisher of the North Raleigh Gideons International Newsletter. A retired IBM information developer, he is a former IBM instructor and a lay speaker at a local Methodist Church.

This book was brought to my attention by a parent of a young child with significant special needs. As the Early Childhood Coordinator responsible for making recommendations to parents, I was eager to acquire this book. I read it with many mis-givings. Yes, there are some accuracies regarding our current programming options for serving these young children. However, in my set of circumstances, this book led to a family rejecting all services for a very needy young lady. This book must be read in context with others. A balanced view needs to be presented.

And *parents* are the right hands. We have to live with and support our children, and in the cases of the developmental disabled, we are talking about a lifetime. Parents get the final say because we love our children and see them in the real world daily.
As Ms. Goodman notes, 'only an extraordinarily ingeneous teacher can be child-directed and flexible, yet conform to an IEP law.' She also notes that The 'cultivated eye' of educationists is trained by a schoolish set of standards about what is 'good.' It is not surprising that parents would approve of this book.

Until we adopted her, our own disabled child was in just such a program and interventionist system such as Ms. Goodman describes unfavourably- they thought it more important that she do tasks that were to her both useless and meaningless- count by rote, do a simple puzzle, sort objects by shape, identify pictures of matching socks.

The retarded, especially the severely retarded, as our daughter, do not transfer what they learn in one arena to another- matching photographs of socks means little to my daughter, and it doesn't help her figure out how to match real socks. She can't talk and she is developmentally about two- counting by rote was not only inappropriate for her developmentally, it is meaningless to a child who will never be able to live without constant care. Setting the table (which we taught her), dressing herself, choosing matching shoes, playing pat-a-cake, singing simple songs, these were things that meant more to her and had more value to her.

This book, along with Jane Healy's book about your child's developing mind, is an excellent guide to natural learning that respect the child as a person.

Goodman's detailed observations of "early intervention" projects and her thoughtful and historically-informed analysis suggest powerfully that the current policy of trying to accelerate "delayed" children in order to keep up with their non-disabled peers, in fact prevents them from learning and exploring at their own pace. She painstakingly documents the way in which unrealistic expectations and demands lead to a situation in which almost continual prompting, directing, "cheating" on behalf of children, and even straightfoward physical manipulation are used to get children to "go through the motions" of a "normal" schedule, regardless of their incomprehension or lack of interest in it. A subtle, restrained book which quietly demolishes educational orthodoxy on this topic.

The book contends that the current process of force feeding specific developemental goals into children who are already having a hard time meshing into our fast paced society, may do more harm than good. I agree with the general theory that true learning can only be acquired through individual discovery, trail and error, rather than repeated drilling and very little if any chance for exploration. My only question is WHERE does this scenario exist for our handicapped children???

This book is very well written for special parents from an author who has extensive firsthand experience. It gives excellent insight about all the steps which the parents have to navigate in the school and public system to help their children to become well integrated into the society.

If she's trying to do a transition plan for teens, she needed to have worded the book differenty.

In the current form, she's directly talking to parents--who can no longer be the center of whatever transition plan is being written up. A transition plan is legally required to be about the future of the person with a disability themselves. And so we needed to be the ones who were addressed. But the book suffers from additional problems.

While her 'close guiding' approach could work for people with severe disabilities needing supervision, the inclusion of information on college leaves me wondering. What is she really trying to accomplish?

Since college students legally must be their own advocates, that section leads me to believe that post-secondary disability law's critical differences from special education is especially not understood. Parents cannot guide their kids in college because there is no yearly planning conference..etc at any college campus. Her ignorance does a horrible diservice to people who will sincerely turn to this book as a resource. Both laws cover disability, but the two have some very important differences from each other.

Future editions of this book need to either pare down the audience she is trying to address. Or they must pare down the options which people could transition to, and conceede the provided list is partial, based on her expertise. When you write books about subjects which you fail to research, myself and others with field experience do see right through.

Guiding Your Teenager With Special Needs through the Transition from School to Adult Life provides insight and practical suggestions for parents, educators and members of the community at large. This book is a reminder to each of us that teaching basic life skills to children with and without diagnosed delays or disabilities, as well as planning for their future, can never begin too early. John and Mary Brown

Jane Bernstein has done an amazing job describing the heartbreak of the initial diagnosis and the ensuing challenges of raising a child with special needs. Having been in this same position with my own daughter, I felt like Jane was sitting in my kitchen watching the struggles we were having and the ones we faced with each passing day. I have recommended this book to colleagues and other families with similar circumstances.

I thought this was a wonderful book. It manages to be not only about what it's like to give birth to a disabled child, but about the particular nuances and responses of a family, about a marriage, an older child's attempts to navigate these waters, the narrator's complex, ambivalent but ultimately loving and couragous response to the child she has borne. Nothing is simple in this book--not Rachels' progress, not her family's response to her, not the medical world that sometimes seems to hurt her as much as it helps her, not the waiting and waiting to see what Rachel will become. Nonetheless, this is a story not only about endurance, but also about the complicated, powerful workings of maternal love.

I have a child who also has this disorder. Loving Rachel was important for me to read because there are no other books written which address Optic Nerve Hypoplasia or Septo Optic Dysplasia, but I want everyone to know who considers reading this that Loving Rachel is not a guide for you or your child and that no two people are affected in exactly the same way by this disorder. I could relate with some of the things Ms. Bernstein wrote about but mainly I walked away from this book feeling sad for this family and for Rachel.

A Special Kind of Brain is extraordinarily beneficial to such caregivers of young children diagnosed with NLD. The author offers detailed descriptions and true insight by exposing her personal experience on maintaining responsibility over a child diagnosed with NLD. Within this book I found the author placed an extensive amount of research on such a diagnosis throughout this difficult journey. Her hands-on awareness introduces a variety of informative aspects to those seeking facts as well as answering a long list of questions that parents inevitably have upon discovering such a diagnosis. All of which has made this book highly successful on offering guidance and courses of action to take for parents of young children diagnosed with NLD. Parents may commonly feel a sense of helplessness during this particular challenging experience. I'm confident that after reading A Special Kind of Brain such parents can press on with a great deal of peace of mind.

A Special Kind of Brain is particularly helpful to parents of young children who have been diagnosed with NLD as well as those who are in the assessment phase of treatment. It is a must read for any parent seeking clear, concise descriptions of NLD behaviors as well as a thorough guide to literature and resources on the topic. The author's humorous insights and recommendations are what set this book apart from what little literature exists to date. The use of humor is precisely what parents of NLD children need; not only to be effective parents but to preserve their own sanity and A Special Kind of Brain does just that.

This book could be helpful to others experiencing puzzling behaviors in small children. It wasn't particularly helpful in our situation - dealing with a teenager. I still do not understand the difference between non verbal learning disability and asperger syndrome which is why I bought the book. The symptoms are so similar that separating them into two syndromes seems to add to the puzzle rather than be helpful.

The author rambles a little bit, and the story jumps back and forth between the present and the past, but it's still an interesting book.

Hearing parents of deaf children would probably find comfort in this book. Understandably, they may be worried about what the future holds for their deaf child. Here you will read the first-hand account of a deaf man who became a doctor, a husband and father, living a completely normal life. Most hearing people have never met a deaf person in their life, and this adds to the confusion for hearing parents who have just been told that their child is deaf. Reading this book should bring some peace of mind to those parents, and hope for their child's future.

I am going deaf due to a tumor and this is the best book I have read yet. It is not easy going from hearing to deaf at 39 and
I am trying to understand what it is I will be going through in the next couple of years and this book has been of great help.
I wish Philip, MD Zazove would wirte more books.

I recomend this to anyone who is hearing or Deaf or HOH.
He explains everything in simple terms and he is very funny.
He wrote about things I never would have thought of.
I am glad I found his book.

Excellent autobiography & well worth reading. I should explain here that I prefer biographies that do not indulge in psychoanalysis of the biographee. For this reason, I often prefer those that are written in first person & those that are written by the person himself/herself.

Zazove does an excellent job. His writing is very clear & flows well. His life story is interesting, if for no other reason than to dispel so many of the hearing people's assumptions about those who lack hearing.

I did find the chronology a little hard to follow, as he jumps back & forth between his current practice in Utah & his childhood & academic career. He says little about his childhood, probably because it was very normal with little by way of shocking or horrifying events. Highly recommended for those who like biographies/autobiographies and for those who are interested in the life of a deaf doctor.

Neurotypical people read books by people with AS to find out about the condition or gain some illusive insight. As a person diagnosed with AS myself I just read them as most people would read any `normal' persons auto-biography... for interest and enjoyment and because, for a change, I can identify with the experiences the main character describes.

Diagnosed with Asperger syndrome at 12 and sent away to a residential school for young people with autism, this is the tale of the next 5 years of this girls life, the characters she meets, the emotional struggles she faces, and her rebellion against a misguided and inflexible system.

However, Jessica makes clear herself in the introduction that this book is not about naming and shaming people from her past. Names are changed, characters are composite, and she describes the experiences rather than the events, in a way that I at least found meaningful and compelling. My only disappointment was reaching the end and still wanting to know what happened next.

I don't think you'll learn much about AS from reading this, but it is still a worthwhile read in my opinion.

In a tone that brings to mind bubbly teenage girls, Jessica Peers recounts five years at a National Autistic Society residential school in the United Kingdom. The back cover of this book suggests that the book will give insights into Asperger's syndrome. On that point, it seems to be wrong. However, it does give a lot of insight into institutional life.

Peers has a talent for wryly amusing caricature, whether in drawing (her cartoons appear throughout the book) or in sketching out people's character in words. Not everything in the book is amusing, though. There are some truly harrowing scenes of physical and emotional abuse by staff, as well as the usual detached brusqueness that crops up in places like that. The funny descriptions offset the often-heavy situations enough to make it readable to me without causing too much pain, and I almost wonder if the author had the same idea herself.

One thing that struck me was how much the actions and social dynamics of the people in the book reminded me of the dynamics in every disability-segregated setting I have ever been in, whether there were autistic people besides me or not. This book is one more that convinces me that whether you call it a group home, a psychiatric ward, special education, or a residential school, some things never change. There are particular spins on things depending on what the setting calls itself and what kind of person is placed in it, and this book is no exception. But its descriptions of life there are surprisingly wide in their applicability.

One thing this book is not, though, is all that insightful about what autism is. It claims to provide insight into autism, but it really doesn't. It describes situations involving a lot of autistic *people*, including the author, but in truth it has ended up more about life in that particular place than about a particular condition. It also contains the common misconception that people who appear "more autistic" are necessarily less aware of their environment and therefore less suffering from what happens around them. People should know that before buying this book -- the real focus is not necessarily the same as the apparent focus.

This is not a problem, though. There are a lot of books out there already that discuss "autism from the inside" ad infinitum. This book describes institutional dynamics from an autistic point of view, which is much rarer, and to my knowledge this is the only book by an autistic person that takes place *only* within such a place.

Bumposauras is a dinosaur that is so near-sighted that he is always bumping into things. Sometimes it gets him into trouble, especially when he runs away from home. His family comes to his rescue and so does Grandma with her glasses. Bumposauras can finally see.

The writing is not the best but if you have a dinosaur lover, they will enjoy the colorful illustrations.

The Bumposaurus, by Penny Mckinlay, is the story of a baby brontosaurus who suffers from poor vision. The poor little brontosaurus is so blind he can't even find the way out of his egg. He keeps mistaking other dinosaurs for his food. His parents, unaware of their child's poor vision, give him several stern lectures on how "Dinosaurs don't eat other dinosaurs." You'll be delighted with how the brontosaurus and his family finally resolve his problem. The illustrations are silly. The text has wit to spare. I'm glad I accidentally bumped into The Bumposaurus. You will be as well.

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