Here are 94 books that Demystifying Disability fans have personally recommended if you like
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Joanna Faber is the daughter of Adele Faber, a pioneer of the internationally acclaimed best-selling How To Talk series that has helped millions of parents worldwide. Joanna joined forces with her childhood friend Julie King to provide support for parents and educators of the 21st century. Each draws on her own experiences – Joanna as a bilingual teacher in West Harlem, Julie as a specialist in helping parents of children on the autism spectrum – to lead workshops and speak to parent groups, teachers, doctors, and librarians worldwide, including online sessions to support parents during Covid lockdowns and afterwards. Together, Joanna and Julie have written two best-selling How To Talk books.
Instead of starting with the question, "How can I change my child's behavior?" Andrew Solomon starts by asking, "How does my child experience the world?"
He tells the stories of parents who have struggled to accept that their children are profoundly different from them and offers a deeply optimistic view of relationships and family. This book takes a fascinating dive into different ways of being human – among them, deafness, dwarfism, transgenderism, autism – and inspires us to look at our children through new eyes.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Books for a Better Life Award, and one of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2012, this masterpiece by the National Book Award–winning author of The Noonday Demon features stories of parents who not only learn to deal with their exceptional children, but also find profound meaning in doing so—“a brave, beautiful book that will expand your humanity” (People).
Solomon’s startling proposition in Far from the Tree is that being exceptional is at the core of the human condition—that difference is what unites us. He writes about…
I'm writer, educator, disability advocate, and mother of a teenage son with multiple disabilities. Since my son’s diagnosis with autism at age three, I've been on a quest to not only understand the way that his unique brain works, but also to advocate for a more just and equitable world for people with disabilities and their families. When researching my book The Little Gate-Crasher, I discovered how much my great-grandmother was a powerful advocate for her son Mace who was born with a form of dwarfism. Our society has evolved in the last one hundred years in terms of inclusion and accessibility—and yet, people with disabilities and their loved ones are often isolated.
Faith communities can play an essential role in the life of people with disabilities—yet many clergy, educators, and lay leaders are still unsure about how to create inclusive and accessible congregations. Christensen, an expert in the faith inclusion world, shares the way to create communities of belonging for all people.
Inclusion is More Than Being––a House of Prayer for All Peoples
Everyone wants to belong—in their community at large and especially their faith-based community. Nearly 20 percent of people live with a disability or mental health condition, which means so many families—maybe even yours—are dealing with these issues for their loved one. The one place everyone should feel like they belong is their house of worship and other faith-based community organizations. From Longing to Belonging is a new approach to inclusion. Author Shelly Christensen, M.A., a leader in faith community disability inclusion, provides step-by-step guidance to any faith-based organization committed…
I'm writer, educator, disability advocate, and mother of a teenage son with multiple disabilities. Since my son’s diagnosis with autism at age three, I've been on a quest to not only understand the way that his unique brain works, but also to advocate for a more just and equitable world for people with disabilities and their families. When researching my book The Little Gate-Crasher, I discovered how much my great-grandmother was a powerful advocate for her son Mace who was born with a form of dwarfism. Our society has evolved in the last one hundred years in terms of inclusion and accessibility—and yet, people with disabilities and their loved ones are often isolated.
Alice Wong is an incredible writer and self-advocate and has put together an anthology of writers who share first-person experiences through. Variety of formats, including essays and interviews. It is eye-opening for anyone who is not disabled and also presents all of the work that our society needs to do to create accessibility and disability justice.
“Disability rights activist Alice Wong brings tough conversations to the forefront of society with this anthology. It sheds light on the experience of life as an individual with disabilities, as told by none other than authors with these life experiences. It's an eye-opening collection that readers will revisit time and time again.” —Chicago Tribune
One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent—but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people, just in time for…
I'm writer, educator, disability advocate, and mother of a teenage son with multiple disabilities. Since my son’s diagnosis with autism at age three, I've been on a quest to not only understand the way that his unique brain works, but also to advocate for a more just and equitable world for people with disabilities and their families. When researching my book The Little Gate-Crasher, I discovered how much my great-grandmother was a powerful advocate for her son Mace who was born with a form of dwarfism. Our society has evolved in the last one hundred years in terms of inclusion and accessibility—and yet, people with disabilities and their loved ones are often isolated.
As a mother of a child with severe autism, I am grateful to Amy Lutz for writing a book that captures our family's unique challenges. Too often, media focuses on people with autism who need a lower level of support and it can feel like life with severe autism is being overlooked. Lutz’s beautiful writing gives you a window into a much-needed read.
In this collection of beautiful and raw essays, Amy S. F. Lutz writes openly about her experience-the positive and the negative-as a mother of a now twenty-one-year-old son with severe autism. Lutz's human emotion drives through each page and challenges commonly held ideas that define autism either as a disease or as neurodiversity. We Walk is inspired by her own questions: What is the place of intellectually and developmentally disabled people in society? What responsibilities do we, as citizens and human beings, have to one another? Who should decide for those who cannot decide for themselves? What is the meaning…
I grew up in the Disability Rights movement in Canada, fighting for my brother’s right to go to school, to receive medical care, and to be part of our community. For decades, disabled people were institutionalized away from their families and communities, warehoused instead of schooled. My uncle Robert died of neglect in one of these terrible places as a child. My family has been involved in supporting a class action lawsuit against the Ontario government for its responsibility. Since then, the right to education has been better established, and the institutions were closed. But I continue to fight for inclusion and against ableism in education, healthcare, and across our culture.
I was lucky to get the opportunity to read an advance copy of Dr. Kerschbaum's latest monograph, Signs of Disability (in the press and available in both print and open access in Fall 2022). The book focuses on the signs of disability we can recognize everywhere around us: yellow diamond-shaped “deaf person in area” road signs, that wheelchair parking icon, the telltale shapes of hearing aids, or white-tipped canes sweeping across footpaths. But even though the signs are ubiquitous, Kerschbaum argues that disability may still not be perceived as anything but a token or an apparition. This engaging, accessible book builds on Kerschbaum’s already-award-winning scholarship on difference and discourse, constructing new research methods and approaches, but also building community on these pages. Drawing on a set of thirty-three research interviews, as well as written narratives by disabled people, this book builds a new system of signs and significance for disability.…
How can we learn to notice the signs of disability?
We see indications of disability everywhere: yellow diamond-shaped "deaf person in area" road signs, the telltale shapes of hearing aids, or white-tipped canes sweeping across footpaths. But even though the signs are ubiquitous, Stephanie L. Kerschbaum argues that disability may still not be perceived due to a process she terms "dis-attention."
To tell better stories of disability, this multidisciplinary work turns to rhetoric, communications, sociology, and phenomenology to understand the processes by which the material world becomes sensory input that then passes through perceptual apparatuses to materialize phenomena-including disability. By…
I grew up in the Disability Rights movement in Canada, fighting for my brother’s right to go to school, to receive medical care, and to be part of our community. For decades, disabled people were institutionalized away from their families and communities, warehoused instead of schooled. My uncle Robert died of neglect in one of these terrible places as a child. My family has been involved in supporting a class action lawsuit against the Ontario government for its responsibility. Since then, the right to education has been better established, and the institutions were closed. But I continue to fight for inclusion and against ableism in education, healthcare, and across our culture.
Black Disability Politicsalso just came out in early Fall 2022, and I was very excited to receive my print copy. The book shows how Black people have long engaged with disability as a political issue tightly tied to race and racism. This, however, has not been the story told in disability studies or in mainstream histories of the Disability Rights movement. Schalk deeply explores archives (for instance those of the Black Panther Party) and layers these findings across interviews with contemporary Black disabled community organizers, to recognize the richness and power of Blackdisability politics. This book is full of surprises, memorable archival anecdotes, and powerful conversations between Schalk and others. You should read this book! If a goal within ableist and white supremacist society is liberation, Schalk shows how essential it is to engage in antiracist, feminist, andanti-ableist political and cultural coalition.
In Black Disability Politics Sami Schalk explores how issues of disability have been and continue to be central to Black activism from the 1970s to the present. Schalk shows how Black people have long engaged with disability as a political issue deeply tied to race and racism. She points out that this work has not been recognized as part of the legacy of disability justice and liberation because Black disability politics differ in language and approach from the mainstream white-dominant disability rights movement. Drawing on the archives of the Black Panther Party and the National Black Women's Health Project alongside…
I grew up in the Disability Rights movement in Canada, fighting for my brother’s right to go to school, to receive medical care, and to be part of our community. For decades, disabled people were institutionalized away from their families and communities, warehoused instead of schooled. My uncle Robert died of neglect in one of these terrible places as a child. My family has been involved in supporting a class action lawsuit against the Ontario government for its responsibility. Since then, the right to education has been better established, and the institutions were closed. But I continue to fight for inclusion and against ableism in education, healthcare, and across our culture.
We are incredibly lucky to have so much important work in disability studies and disability justice coming out in the Fall of 2022. The Future Is Disabled is Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s much-anticipated follow-up toCare Work: Dreaming Disability Justice.Written during lockdown, this is an urgent and beautiful book, shifting from love letters to songs, recipes for survival, and provocative questions. For instance and central to this work, the book asks: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled—and what if that's not a bad thing? The truth is that disabled people have had to weather an unprecedented assault on their value and had to assume huge risks over the past few years, as Nishida also shows. As with Kerschbaum, Nishida, and Schalk’s books, Piepzna-Samarasinha converses with disabled people to carefully document the many ways they have kept and are keeping each other—and the…
In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled―and what if that’s not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it’s possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation
Building on the work of her game changing book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about disability justice at the end of the world, documenting the many ways disabled people kept and are keeping each other―and the…
I’ve lived most of my life with invisible disabilities that affect my daily activities, and I hope to encourage nuanced, empowering, and inclusive conversations about disabilities with my book, So Much More to Helen! All of my nonfiction picture books—Miep and the Most Famous Diary, Winged Wonders, Cougar Crossing, Ocean Soup, Make Way for Animals!, and more—are about “solutionaries” who help people, animals, and the planet. They’ve won Golden Kite and Eureka! Nonfiction Honor Awards, starred reviews, and spots on best book and state reading lists. Mostly, I hope they inspire compassion, curiosity, and action.
This book, for me, is important as the first trade nonfiction picture book about the fight for the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). I hope and assume more books on this topic are in the pipeline, as there is so much more to share with kids about this crucial social justice movement! Jennifer Keenan’s story is great for kids because she was a kid herself when she crawled up the U.S. Capitol steps to fight for disability rights. This book offers an inspiring, personal entryway into the disability rights movement and the importance of having laws and systems to back up beliefs about access for all.
2021 Schneider Family Book Award Young Children's Honor Book (American Library Association) Experience the true story of lifelong activist Jennifer Keelan-Chaffins and her participation in the Capitol Crawl in this inspiring autobiographical picture book. This beautifully illustrated story includes a foreword from Jennifer and backmatter detailing her life and the history of the disability rights movement. This is the story of a little girl who just wanted to go, even when others tried to stop her. Jennifer Keelan was determined to make a change-even if she was just a kid. She never thought her wheelchair could slow her down, but…
I grew up in the Disability Rights movement in Canada, fighting for my brother’s right to go to school, to receive medical care, and to be part of our community. For decades, disabled people were institutionalized away from their families and communities, warehoused instead of schooled. My uncle Robert died of neglect in one of these terrible places as a child. My family has been involved in supporting a class action lawsuit against the Ontario government for its responsibility. Since then, the right to education has been better established, and the institutions were closed. But I continue to fight for inclusion and against ableism in education, healthcare, and across our culture.
Though it came out in the Summer of 2022, and had a headstart on the other books on my list, Just Careis in conversation with the rest of this list, and is just as relevant to our current moment, when we might agree that we have a crisis of care. Nishida shows that care dynamics exist within a brutal social order that determines who survives and who deteriorates. Along with the other books on this list, the research methods are creatively mixed here, with interviews, focus groups, and participant observation with care workers and people with disabilities. Just Care documents how people with disabilities work together to reimagine care. We are all enmeshed in a healthcare industry with giant cracks and fissures exposed by the pandemic, and in which we will all move between caregiving, receiving, or both. ReadJust Care to better understand imbalances in care, as well…
Just Care is Akemi Nishida's thoughtful examination of care injustice and social justice enabled through care. The current neoliberal political economy has turned care into a business opportunity for the healthcare industrial complex and a mechanism of social oppression and control. Nishida analyzes the challenges people negotiate whether they are situated as caregivers, receivers, or both. Also illuminated is how people with disabilities come together to assemble community care collectives and bed activism (resistance and visions emerging from the space of bed) to reimagine care as a key element for social change.
I grew up in the Disability Rights movement in Canada, fighting for my brother’s right to go to school, to receive medical care, and to be part of our community. For decades, disabled people were institutionalized away from their families and communities, warehoused instead of schooled. My uncle Robert died of neglect in one of these terrible places as a child. My family has been involved in supporting a class action lawsuit against the Ontario government for its responsibility. Since then, the right to education has been better established, and the institutions were closed. But I continue to fight for inclusion and against ableism in education, healthcare, and across our culture.
This recently-released memoir is by Alice Wong, who directs the important Disability Visibility Project, which you should also check out! This book blends a variety of approaches and media to create a series of snapshots and provocations from Alice Wong’s life, mainly narrated through the relationships of care and community she has built. Through this memoir, you’ll get a history of disability activism over the past two decades, but you will also meet an incredibly funny, creative, and dedicated activist.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • ONE OF USA TODAY'S MUST-READ BOOKS • 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 provides deep truths in this fun and deceptively easy read about her survival in this hectic and ableist society.” —Selma Blair, bestselling author of Mean Baby
In Chinese culture, the tiger is deeply revered for its confidence, passion, ambition, and ferocity. That same fighting spirit resides in Alice Wong.
