Disability-and-Health Books

I bought this book a couple years ago, after I had to start using a manual wheelchair. I liked the first chapter that talks about the history of the wheelchair and 2 companies that made it to the top ranks in wheelchair invention and sales (Everest & Jennings and Quickie). Though it is packed with a lot of very good information on how to select accessories for your chair and the difference between power chairs (rear, front, or mid wheel drive), most of the manufacturer information is outdated. In fact, some of the companies the author provides are out of business or have been bought out by other mobility companies.
The only part that isn't realy outdated is the section on wheelchair cushions, since most of the cushions the author mentions are still on the market. Other than the book needing a makeover, its still a good basic wheelchair reference guide.

I found this book from Spinlife.com where they publish excerpts as an online aid to selecting wheelchair components.

The author is a long term wheelchair user and athelete who had a Spinal Cord Injury (SCI). He knows more about wheelchairs than anyone writing for the public. As such he is an effective advocate for wheelchair use.

The book is logically laid out from wheelchair history to the selection process to wheelchair maintenance. The style is informative without being too technical. However, the wheelchair is a machine so expect a little tech talk. The chapter on maintance is wisely a primer and checklist - most people who use a wheelchair are not advised to tinker with them.

I recommend the book, even to someone who is already using a chair with two provisos.

1. For someone with neuromuscular disabilty, the advice to use a manual chair is ill advised. All the PT's and OT's I have seen in the past few years recommend power chairs to save your arms and avoid turning a parapalegic into a quadrapalegic. As Dr. Silver puts it "Save your arms. They are your independance." and "When do I recommend a manual chair? Almost never..." (Post Polio Syndrome: A Guide for Polio Survivors and their Families)

2. Don't try chasing down his references on wheelchair reviews or evaluations. They are non-existent from any official sources and this reflects the age of the book (1998). If you want reviews and opinions on chairs, try wheelchairjunkie.com.

Through Dr. Leavitt's new book, readers in the field of rehabilitation have an opportunity to greatly improve their understanding of various cultural and ethnic groups. To cover the cultural diversity aspect, Dr. Leavitt searched and found an international multidisciplinary group of outstanding authors. Working with forty special contributors, she has produced a text that offers practical information on cross-cultural and international rehabilitation and brings together "the art and science of rehabilitation with applied medical anthropology." Medical and rehabiliaition personnel, rather than focusing on their specific area of clinical expertise, will, with a thorough reading of this text, come to appreciate the socio-cultural context in which their patients/clients live. With such an appreciation, the rehabilitaion process will be facilitated and patient/professional relationships greatly enhanced. With very little material published on cultural diversity and international rehabilitation, I expect Leavitt's book will be recognized as a major contribution to better understanding of peoples throughout the world.

I nearly read this book cover to cover while preparing for a talk on Cultural Competency in the hospital setting. I am a physical therapist and also a Spanish interpreter. I have 20 years of experience as a PT and 5 as an interpreter. While Ms.Leavitt certainly spent a lot of time putting this book together,(and I apologize to the author as I've not met you yet I am being critical of your work)it is written in a very scholarly manner but has very little practical application in my opinion. I was looking for examples of various inter-cultural misunderstandings,insights,interpretations and resolutions. I was looking for explanations from a "culture broker's" perspective to help me have better insight. Mostly it looked at cultural diffferneces as disabilities. I also thought it interesting that where there were language differences,I found no mention of getting a trained interpreter, which I think is absoluely essential to good interactions between individuals who don't share a common language. It mentioned professionals trying to learn more of the language or perhaps having the person bring an interpreter with them or to use a medical staff person who speaks the language. Language interpretation itself is a profession and all too often medical personnel and facilites leave themselves open to litigation and inadequate care of the patient by not providing skilled interpreters. I'm sorry, I found this book not to be very useful at all....

I work with an agency serving visually impaired persons. For years, we have read excerpts aloud from this book to our independent living training classes for persons with vision loss. We have received nothing but rave reviews about this book and numerous complaints that it could not be obtained on cassette tape. It is a very worthwhile and realistic book about one woman's experience of vision loss, which resounds with many visually impaired persons.

While there are a few useful suggestions, most of the material in this book is dicouraging and false. Blind people can and do all things sight persons do, without many of the issues discussed in this book. People navigate restrooms without help, eat in restaurants without making a mess of themselves or the table without extra plates and napkins, and so much more. "Touch the Top of the World" by Erik Weihenmayer, is a much more accurate description of blindness.

I was actually quite disappointed in this book. I have really liked other books by this author in the past, but this one is more like an etiquette book than anything else, just a list of rules, and that is not what Asperger's kids need. Certainly there are some good points in the book, and Asperger's kids do need more reminders, but the presentation style is not especially effective. The idea of using cards perhaps has some merit, but on the whole I think the similar book by Dr. Jed Baker (The Picture Book of Social Stories, or something like that) does a better job of helping Asperger's kids make sense of social situations.

If you are the sort of person who responds well to a rigourous, structured, self disciplined approach to things then you'll probably like this. Personally, I'm not that sort of person and I got tired just reading it.

The author says "THIS BOOK CAN HELP YOU CHANGE THE COURSE OF YOUR LIFE". What follows is a series of short tips and advice about everyday things and getting practice relating to others. It probably won't change your life.

It's a nice little book though with much that is positive and helpful to say and a very nice section on the science behind defining Aspergers which I found very interesting.

This book was very educational and I learned a lot, but there weren't many exciting parts. There was at least one picture on every page. The ammount of detail the author uses helps you get a good idea of what it was like to live during the plague and how hard life was at the time.

This book is a great study guide, with lots of pictures and different topics that were spread throughout the book, each section averaging 3/4 of a page long. This book teaches the people who read it how hard life was and what it may have been if it were not for the black death.

Although it had great information, it was a 'whoop-de-doo' book with no funny expressions just monotone language that made me think of a stick with mud slowly dripping off of it. It could have made a joke about how the black death ended or something!!!

That is why this book is average.

I have this edition and the one prior to this. Neither one is that useful. When I bought the 1st edition I thought it wasn't very helpful just because it was somewhat out of date, so went ahead and got this newer version hoping it would be more insightful. However, I am just as disappointed with this one as I was the first. I have a child who has this syndrome and had thought it would be a useful book to have on hand when my child has a new teacher, or a new baby sitter, or anyone else who is new in his life, but it really doesn't help much. It may in fact portray people with prader willi syndrome in a manner that is too negative, and provides little in the way of meaningful information re: helping or supporting the child or adult with prader willi syndrome. I am sorry I spent the money on it.

It addresses areas specific to respective disciplines/professionals/areas of concern where parents or professionals can review without having to read the entire text yet allows them to get a good handle on the spectrum of the disabilitiy if they choose to.

This is a book that should be compulsory reading for every parent and would-be parent, for every student, for every pastor, for every medical doctor, for every teacher. There is no one who has anything to do with children and their development who should not read this book.

In this book it is shown that it is totally wrong to think of humans as coming into this world with all the necessary information stored up within them. Animals, yes, they have instincts such that when raised apart from their natural mother they will develop into the creature they are supposed to be. Man does not have that instinct. Everything he becomes he has to learn. And to learn it correctly he needs to be instructed correctly. Even his conscience has to be developed and taught. That is the repeating refrain in this book. We have to be taught everything we eventually know. And if that instruction is not done correctly we will not learn. If we are not subjected to the discipline of learning, of building up a base of knowledge then we are going to drop out of society.

Children have to be taught and taught correctly. The modern system of education where the child is left to discover things for himself is as much use as taking a railroad engine off its tracks and saying, "Make your own free way through this land." How far will that engine get? It will get nowhere. For it is only free to travel throughout the land so long as it stays on its tracks, as long as the discipline of the tracks is applied to it. In this book we are given the illustration of sports. Every sport is played to a very strict code. There are referees and umpires at every turn. And woe betide the player who does not play according to the rules. Well, life is exactly like that. There are certain rules and our children have to be taught those rules, they don't discover them for themselves. The many so-called mental disorders, that children supposedly sufffer from today, are no more than a lack of discipline where the child is allowed to freely express itself with no regard for others, thereby not learning the value and need for self-discipline.

This book has been thoroughly researched and its findings well documented. That is why I can say the authors prove their case when they maintain that mind-altering drugs are not the solution for children who cannot seem to learn something and who are frustrated in their learning process. Any of us who are frustrated by something unknown would behave in a similar fashion even though we have learned the necessity of discipline in our own lives. I think the familiar joke of the golfer throwing away a club when he has duffed a shot will bear that out.

The authors place the responsibility for training children squarely on the shoulders of the parents. However, you are not left feeling guilty about your shortcomings and failures. They outline how a child learns and how a parent should teach and train their children. They give some very practical help on how to love and discipline one's child in such a way that it retains its dignity. It is not an easy task. You may insist upon correct behaviour in the home, but the school, the media, your child's peers are all insisting that he or she throw off the yoke of parental guidance and be free, as they call it. This, however, is a road that leads to self-destruction. But it can be done! If one wants to raise good and responsible children one must understand that no two children are the same. Some things we take to quite naturally, others can only learn with great difficulty. But any person can learn. That is the good news. And you can overcome your child's so-called learning problem by applying the right technique.

If you care about your child, if you love your child, you will get this book and be informed as to what is happening around you. This applies especially to those of you who are having difficulty with your offspring. They are not mentally deficient. They do not have ADHD, ODD, Conduct Disorder or any other such term that infers that there is something wrong with them. Your child is normal. All he needs is the correct love and discipline and the correct instruction that will create a foundation of knowledge that he can use to make the necessary correct discoveries as he goes through life.

If you are looking for a book to help you understand ADHD and/or trying to get some answers about choosing to medicate your child or not - this is not it!!! The entire book is about the field of psychology and how ADHD was "made up" by doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists. It spans everything from the failure of the public educational system to the failure of our society. In fact, ADHD is hardly discussed at all except at the end of the book. In the last few chapters, the author explains how to parent without medications. His answer - spank your child for every infraction. His viewpoint is that children are being diagnosed with ADHD because parents are not discipling their children correctly, if at all. And that is the reason why children can't sit still in school, are easily distracted, etc - because we, as parents, haven't trained them to do so!! Once again, don't get this book if you are looking for answers because you will find none here!

I am an older sibling of a child with a cleft and I found this book to be helpful in so many ways when re-searching what was going to be done to my baby brother. It used enough technical terms to explain what was going on, but it also explained things as well. I know that my mother would often read the chapter called Aiden; One child's story when she needed to find hope for her own son. I would recommend this book to everyone whether they are researching clefts or they have a family member who has a cleft. This is a wonderful book that was so extrememly helpful to both me and my family and well as other mom's I've talked to around the country.

I found this book to have very basic information on cleft lip and palate, which was good in that it presents the conditions in non-medical terms for the most part. However, it did not explore some of the more current methods of treatment, including pre-surgical devices, and it seems to have been sponsored by a specific support group which is never really disclosed. I found the nauseating mention of this group over and over and over again to be quite an obvious overkill, and I had to return mine copy. I need a more objective book so that I may come to my own conclusions, and I suggest that other parents do the same.

Landau does a good job of covering the basics of blindness, but because this is a book for young people, I had hoped she would address the types of questions they have about what it's like to be blind. She did not.It's missing the personal stuff that makes a topic like this meaningful to kids.

The closure of mental hospital written by prof. Peter Hall was an excellent reference book to describe the background, history and development of community psychiatry in England.