Disability Awareness Guest List

Created on June 27, 2023, 9:32 am

Last Updated July 3, 2024, 10:35 am

Recommended reads from Arlington County's LEAD Employee Resource Group for Disability Awareness Month 2023
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Echoing “Nothing about us without us,” these essays touch on every aspect of life from those living with disability: isolation to relationships to disabled joy.
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One of the most influential disability rights activists in US history tells her personal story of fighting for the right to receive an education, have a job, and just be human. A story of fighting to belong in a world that wasn't built for all of us and of one woman's activism--from the streets of Brooklyn and San Francisco to inside the halls of Washington--Being Heumann recounts Judy Heumann's lifelong battle to achieve respect, acceptance, and inclusion in society.
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This book chronicles the unforgettable account of one of the most severe child abuse cases in California history. It is the story of Dave Pelzer, who was brutally beaten and starved by his emotionally unstable, alcoholic mother: a mother who played tortuous, unpredictable games--games that left him nearly dead. He had to learn how to play his mother's games in order to survive because she no longer considered him a son, but a slave; and no longer a boy, but an "it."
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Learn the incredible story of Illinois senator and Iraq War veteran Tammy Duckworth and see what inspired her to follow the path that made her who she is today. In Every Day Is a Gift , Tammy Duckworth takes readers through the amazing--and amazingly true--stories from her incomparable life.
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Brad Cohen's story is not one of self-pity. His unwavering determination and fiercely positive attitude conquered the difficulties he faced in school, in college, and while job hunting. Brad never stopped striving, and after twenty-four interviews, he landed his dream job: teaching grade school and nurturing all of his students as a positive, encouraging role model. Front of the Class tells his inspirational story.
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Justice Sotomayor uses her own experience as a child who was diagnosed with diabetes to tell a story of kids of all different abilities working together to build a community garden, asking questions of each other along the way, this book encourages readers to do the same: When we come across someone who is different from us but we're not sure why, all we have to do is ‘Just Ask’.
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This autobiography takes us into the mind and fascinating life of a “savant” who grew up before Asperger’s Syndrome was commonly diagnosed and learned of his condition at age 40.
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The Noonday Demon is Andrew Solomon’s National Book Award-winning, bestselling, and transformative masterpiece on depression—“the book for a generation, elegantly written, meticulously researched, empathetic, and enlightening” (Time)—now with a major new chapter covering recently introduced and novel treatments, suicide and anti-depressants, pregnancy and depression, and much more.
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Nothing About Us Without Us is the first book in the literature on disability to provide a theoretical overview of disability oppression that shows its similarities to, and differences from, racism, sexism, and colonialism. Charlton's analysis is illuminated by interviews he conducted over a ten-year period with disability rights activists throughout the Third World, Europe, and the United States.
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Featured in the Oscar-nominated documentary Crip Camp, and for readers of I Am Malala, one of the most influential disability rights activists in US history tells her story of fighting to belong. "If I didn't fight, who would?" Judy Heumann was only 5 years old when she was first denied her right to attend school. Paralyzed from polio and raised by her Holocaust-surviving parents in New York City, Judy had a drive for equality that was instilled early in life
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Saving Milly is Kondracke’s powerfully moving chronicle of his vital and volatile marriage, one that has endured and deepened in the face of Parkinson’s Disease; it also follows his own transformation from careerist to caregiver and activist, a man who will “fight all the way, without pause or rest, to ‘save’ his beloved Milly.”
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This groundbreaking memoir offers a glimpse into an activist's journey to finding and cultivating community and the continued fight for disability justice, from the founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project" Alice Wong
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