5 comments about Della Raye: A Girl Who Grew Up in Hell and Emerged Whole.

1. This book is about Della Raye Rogers who at age 4, along with her mother and some other relatives, was committed to the Partlow State School for Mental Deficients in Alabama. It was 1929 and Della Raye's Uncle Richard was too poor to shoulder the burden of caring for himself and his "feeble-minded" relations so he had them institutionalized. At the state school the patients were classified as "morons", "imbeciles" or "idiots". The staff was mostly untrained and uneducated so the "school" was more of an underfunded warehouse for those who were unable to care for themselves. After suffering 20 years of horrifying physical, psychological and emotional abuse, Della Raye was finally released. She found that she not only had the spirit & intelligence to live her life fully, but also the grace to forgive those who had treated her so badly. A heart-warming, inspiring story of the power of love and faith.



2. On Saturday, September 20th, 2003 @ 3:00AM Della Raye Hughes became one of the most celebrated angels in the Heavens. I love you and will miss you terribly Della Raye. Right now you are probably flitting from angel to angel doing comb outs, setting perms and trimming locks. I wish you well on your journey.I am honored to have known you. Please look down on me from time to time. Lord knows I need all the guardian angel help I can get, oh, and it wouldn't hurt if you put a good word or two in for me (insurance...you know). Thank you for all the inspiration, encouraging words,laughs,long distance hugs and for the trust you placed in me. You will always be in my thoughts with much love and respect.



3. I drive by Partlow every night on my way home from work. As a resident of Tuscaloosa, you sometimes forget that Partlow and Bryce are there. As you head towards the bridge to cross the river, the top of the main building at Bryce is easily seen from afar, and I'm sure visitors to the area probably think it to be an antebellum home. Instead, the sprawling grounds of Partlow and Bryce speak of the sad state of "care" in this state, in the past and in the present. I truly loved this book, and I always hoped after I read it for the first time that I would run in to Della Raye somewhere in town and get to meet her. I know she's gone now, but what a testament she left. I hope many more people will read this story. She never became famous, but she showed courage and perseverence and forgiveness and love to the world, a world that locked her away and demeaned her existence.



4. Della Raye is only one of hundreds of children from age 2 through age 21 who were shipped off by one or both parents to Partlow who simply did not want to care for them any more. Fortunately she, and others whom I personally know, came through it, although they will never forget the nightmares of being locked in a 4 x 4 room for a month for stealing a piece of cornbread, or worse yet, beging stripped naked and taking turns for showers until all patients in that building were finished. No personal clothing, no books, no radios, or newspapers, when a relative of mine was released after ten years, she did not even know how to dial a phone or how to apply for a job. This book is a true story of one person's hell, replicated thousands of times over at least 50 years, and must be read to be believed. Believe me, it is all true.



5. This is an eye-opening, gripping account of mental institutions during the Depression and after. It is well told and keeps the reader hanging. I could not put it down. Once I connected with Della Raye, I had to know what would happen next.

5 comments about Adopting Alyosha: A Single Man Finds a Son in Russia.

1. I knew the book would be good, but had no idea it would effect me so profoundly--it brought tears to eyes--such passion and compassion in this man and his quest for a son. You'll be the edge of your seat throughout the book. What determination this man has, what insight and strength of character to follow through despite the many obstacles he managed to tackle. I want more!!!!When is the next book coming out? This is must read for anyone who loves children, who is intersted in adoption or anyone who has challenges and needs inspiration!!!



2. I received this book with low expectations considering previous tactical books I had read on the subject. It stopped me in my tracks.
   I was so impressed by Robert's literary style and story-telling ability. He allows us to go through the entire process and share very personal emotions --discovering with him important lessons for anyone involved in international adoption. The frustrations and bureaucracy encountered are almost overwhelming, but well worth it. I loved this book. I would highly recommend it to anyone considering international adoption--single or married. However, I would also recommend it to anyone who would enjoy an inspirational true story about a man and a boy half-way accross the world who seemed destined to be family. I promise it will change your perspective on adoption and what it means to love. All we need now is the sequel. Thanks Robert for living and telling your story.
   (One more thought, if I were a TV producer, it would make a great Sunday Night Movie)



3. I've never stayed up until three in the morning to read an entire book... I was bleary-eyed this morning, but Klose's story has kept me motivated all day... I, too, am a single man and have been considering adoption as a way to grow my own family... There is so very little written about single men who want to adopt children specifically, and I'm so glad I found this book, and I did so completely by accident... Klause is an swesome storyteller - his descriptions of his environments (both external and internal) were so vivid I felt like I was righit there with him - in his backyard in Maine, on the airplane going to Russia, and in the little ram-shakle house that Aloysha lived in... It was a very visual story - it unfolded like a movie...This is an emotional roller-coaster ride of a story, plowing thru pracitally every emotion on the human scale... In the scene when little Aloysha first looks to Klose and asks, "Papa?", my heart just about popped... Great as a travelogue, an instruction manual, and an inspirational story on how a single man can create a family... Click on "Add to cart" and BUY THIS BOOK!!!!



4. After contemplating single parent adoption (I'm a 39 yo guy) this book has cemented the awesome choice that I'm about to make. The author details the long and hard road he took to be united with his little boy. It details his experiences with the massive bureaucracy BOTH in Russia and the United States along with the subtle and unfair suspicious stigma single males encounter by some adoption agencies and social workers. I recommed this book highly for all single men thinking about adoption.



5. This is a rare gem, enriching and very funny. I loved it and it is now doing the rounds of friends and family.

5 comments about No Magic Wands.

1. You can't help but feel sympathy for the author as you read of her physical travails and disability. Written in a very direct and personal style, the author trys to convey a determination to overcome adversity in the face of overwhelming obstacles. In that she succeeds. A good book on chronic illness in general and for people with multiple sclerosis specifically.



2. Pain will never be as severe as previously experienced by me. This woman had such brilliant mentality, could voice her experiences and feelings so eloquently. She is a super human being. Thanks for letting me share it.



3. I was told by my son about this book. I don't read much and I didn't believe it would be possible for a book to affect people too much. We live in Canada and our son visited us from NH. He brought the book and I read it quick. Then I read it again real slow. I have MS and am in a wheelchair most of the time. I thought nothing but pills could relax me or stop me from feeling sorry for myself, and useless. Now I can see that my life ain't so bad. I can understand Mrs. Nichols' ideas better now. She is a great writer and definitely a great inspiration to people like me. I would like to give her a hug if I ever meet her because I started to stop feeling sorry for myself all the time. I also try to do things for myself instead of expecting everyone to do things for me. I also started listening to music. Now when I get upset I relax listening to classical music and slower tunes from the Big Band Era. There is so much good stuff in this book and I will read it again and again. I know a little of what Mrs. Nichols thinks and feels, but for now I can smile once in a while when I succeed at something. And I have not felt like smiling in a real long time. I wish this book could be bought in bookstores, and I wish Mrs. Nichols could sign my book - when I get it - she talks about wishes too. Maybe it will happen and maybe not but as long as I can read the book and think about my wishes and listen to some music instead of some depressing news then Mrs. Nichols has shown me a way to see myself as a real person. Thank you so much Beverly S.Nichols.



4. When I first hear about her book I knew I had to have it. No Magic Wands could have been my story with all the ups and down in it. I feel like there is SOME ONE out there who knows what it is like to have your world thrown in your face and the ability to keep on going forward.She has given me the incentive to keep my dreams alive and to go for them whenever possible. To keep on trying !!



5. I have severe pain from a bad disk in my back. The doctors don't do much and they don't really listen to me. The chapter about doctors really hit home to me. I have read that chapter 6 times and now I smile alot when my back hurts. This whole book makes me smile. Beverly S. Nichols has written a book that gives people in pain an understanding of pain, pain management, and a way for family and friends to understand too. I tell everyone to read this book. I can listen to music and not worry about me. How can I think I am so bad when I can work, shop, play with my grandchildren, and do what I want when I know there are people like Mrs. Nichols who are so limited. I wish you well Beverly.

5 comments about Everyday Heaven: Journeys Beyond the Stereotypes of Autism.

1. Donna is changing the way that, hopefully, millions of people think about 'Autism'. Everyday Heavan gives a wonderful insight into the world of a fantastic lady on the Autism spectrum. In this fascinating book Donna shares the ups and downs of relationships, exposure anxiety, information processing, connection, tolerance, contol, dietary difficulties and many more experiences that she has had. You will be captivated by the warmth and passion that Donna brings to the Neuro -Typical world of Disabling barriers.



2. Of all Donna Williams' books, "Everyday Heaven" is one of my very favorites. The fourth in her autobiographical series, this part of her story invites us to be a fly on the wall while she navigates life and love in her thirties. Donna's unbridled candor draws you in, and her clarity and insight hold you fast. When you read it, you'll want to have a box of tissues near by, and also a friend to share some of her humorous anecdotes with. What strikes me in this book, is that in spite of the horrific circumstances she survived in her early childhood, and to whatever extent her Autism continues to impact her daily life, there is never a moment of blame or bitterness. She personifies resilience and a lust for life. If you dare to read any of her books, Donna Williams is someone who will take all of your excuses away. "Everyday Heaven" is a heavenly read.



3. Those who have read Donna Williams' other three autobiographies will continue to find ideas and insights that will stretch anybody's understanding of autism far beyond textbooks and what professionals have published. But more than that, even if you aren't especially interested in autism, this book is about the zest for and love of life. Considering how gloomy and bitter Williams could be if she chose, "Everyday Heaven" really serves as an inspirational memoir. In spite of the very real hardships she describes, this book filled me with joy.



4. Thank you, Donna. I am an avid fan of Donna Williams' autobiographical and other scholarly writing on 'autism'. She is a true peacemaker. In her previous book, Like Colour to the Blind, I found tremendous insight into the kinds of problems that many of us encounter when we expand our world to include that of another in an intimate partnership.
   
   Similarly, reading Everyday Heaven inspired me to continue to understand and deepen my relationship with myself. Donna's style is ever fresh and impeccably precise. She continues to charter the borderlands of differences in thinking, feeling, perceiving and behaving that have been labeled 'autistic'. Perhaps with so eloquent a mapmaker as our guide, the rest of us can learn greater tolerance for all of the individual 'autistic' realities that we each bring to bear in the creation of this thing that we think we share called 'consensual reality'. Maybe then there will be peace and Everyday Heaven on earth.



5. Donna Williams is already one of the most famous people diagnosed with Autism in the world and people look up to her achievements and particularly perhaps, the fact that as an Autistic person, contrary to all existing stereotypes at that time, she has married and, of course, an iconic writer of heterosexual romance.
   
   But all is not what it seems. Agoraphobic, outside of her public face, Donna is actually a relative recluse on a farm in the middle of nowhere, completely controlled by her obsessive rather Autistic-Spectrum and somewhat multiple-personalitied husband, Ian. She is beginning to discover that not all 'Auties' are nice at all and the one she's married is a doosie.
   
   Now, on the day of their second wedding aniversary, only one week after the death of her eccentric rather bipolar father from cancer and in the middle of the filming of a documentary about her life, Donna is falling deeply 'in like' with one of the crew, Mick who himself lost the father he loved. Now Ian boldly de-masks and announces he wants to run off with the male producer!
   
   The de-masked Ian clinically announces how he has now qualified for being two years in the marriage and, hence, is entitled to half of everything she ever made from her internationally bestselling books. To boot, she has only a few weeks before flying to America to give a talk about being happily married and on the Autistic Spectrum before a massive US audience!
   
   As Ian packs up the furnishings and strips their house bare and the cameras keep rolling, Donna's 'in like'with Mick has turned to being in love and after she starts a smart drug she finds herself developing lust for the first time in her life at the ripe old age of thirty-two.
   
   But Mick has his own challenges with love, sex, identity and alcohol and with the help of a colorful hippy eccentric dance teacher, Margo, Donna finds herself on the road again. More alone as famous than she would ever have been otherwise, and deeply traumatised by the death of her father, she confronts her sexual orientation and attraction to women, going to a gay club specifically to meet 'someone'. She ends up in a torid sexual relationship with an alcoholic lesbian, Shelly. Then her best friend, Margo, goes suddenly into a coma, then dies from a brain haemmorage, and soon even Donna's beloved cat Monty joins the 'other side'.
   
   It's like everyone is dying and she is surrounded by their 'ghosts'. But among the ghosts awaits an angel named Chris who in rescueing him from his own messy love triangle, she rescues herself from the edge of breakdown.
   
   Everyday Heaven is a humorous, moving, riveting, roller-coaster of a book.

No comments about The Disability Experience: A Healing Journey.

No comments about Home Bound: Growing Up With a Disability in America.

1 comments about Positively PCOS.

1. This book is really for anyone who is stuggling with infertility, and even better for those with PCOS. Hansen candidly explains her trials and tribulations with trying to become pregnant, and details the painful 22 cycles, and three years it took her to become pregnant. I wondered for a bit why the book had PCOS in the title as she rarely refers to it, and never talks about being diagnosed. Later in the book she does explain that she does not suffer from the other random but "charasteristic" sypmtopms so many others do. I liked the book because it's from a patient perspective, and seems to have a healthly positive message, and nothing dangerous as you would often find in patient written medical books. She does a great job at detailing her experience, and being honest about things she cannot recount, or does not know. Her knowledge is vast, and is written and presented in a non-intimidating way. I wish it has included more of her husbands feelings, and details, rather than just her own, but it was still written well. She uses a little sarcasm to lighten the load as she goes through let down after let down. There is great info on OHSS which I had never read about, and was pleased to learn something new. There is no speechy chapter after chapter that you find in other PCOS books about what PCOS is. Overall, it was empowering to read, and up-lifting. I highlu recommend!

5 comments about In the House of My Fear: A Memoir.

1. All of us who were "on the scene" in the sixties, that indescribable time of extacy and rage, now have a book that like no other helps us to understand our own experience of the time. Younger readers will learn more about this watershed moment in modern American history by reading this novelized memoir than by reading the historians. Unlike his father in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee's focus is inward, an attempt at a "rescue mission" to release the ghosts of past terrors. Agee's journey takes us on an often breathtaking trip in a VW bus through North Africa, Spain, France, Switzerland, and finally England, where he loses his bus and, temporarily, his mind. Readers of Agee's earlier memoir of boyhood, Thirteen Years, will welcome this continuation of a remarkable biography by a brilliant prose stylist.



2. IN THE HOUSE OF MY FEAR is a great book. Not only is Joel Agee a wonderfully gifted writer and storyteller, but his memoir/novel is a terrific evocation of a time when many young people said, "Make love not war," and "May the Baby Jesus shut your mouth and open up your eyes." I was a photographer in the 1960's and did my own book about that time period (Britannia Press, "It Happened In Monterey") about the 1967 milestone, the Monterey Pop Festival. I remember that era with fondness and wonder.
   In telling his own story of gradual breakdown and eventual breakthrough into self-realization, Agee recounts a series of incredible adventures and meetings. He also captures the essence of a time when no dream seemed impossible, and manages to evoke, not just remember, a consciousness I believed was buried before reading this book. I have always wished for writing that succeeded in revealing the hippy experience, always wondered if a psychedelic drug trip could find expression in language. This book does both. It is also a timeless story about a soul's passage through great danger and ultimate redemption. I recommend it highly.



3. Joel Agee read at my Reading Series last week (March 4, 2005). This is the introduction I gave for that event:
   
   I received an e-mail from Joel Agee. Spoke to him. Then, last week, I met him. Despite that, while reading "In the House of My Fear," late in the book, while a man is wandering through the streets of London, the abyss very near, I totally forgot that the very same man and I exchanged e-mails not a day before. I felt...afraid...for him.
   
   The places--on the map and in the mind--that Joel Agee describes--often seem impossible to escape from and emerge...what? Sane? Whole? I don't know.
   
   I often forgot--completely, as if the words "a memoir" were not written on the front of the book--that what I was reading was true. The events related in this book...happened, even though the narrator hardly believes much of it was actually real while it was happening to him. It sometimes seems like a common thing; we read books, see films, listen to music, view paintings, etc..., and the power of great art takes us out of ourselves, even briefly, to another, more wondrous place. Places that exist only in the mind of the artist, who, if expert, by an act akin to telepathy, transmits those experiences to us, profoundly.
   
   But beyond the simple telling, the act of transmission, "In the House of My Fear" has a power, a force, that I simply have not experienced as a reader, maybe ever. The act of reading it was, for me, a physically altering experience. I do much of my reading these days on the subway. Now, in New York, where eye contact is often seen as threat, and displays of public emotion are usually frowned upon, my reactions to this book could not help but have been expressed. I found myself, at one point, almost folded in half, holding the book between my legs. The story had literally bowed me down. I can't imagine what the people on a crowded E Train thought at that moment.
   
   And I took the sensations, the moods, the feeling imprinted upon me by this amazing book up from the underground, to the world above. The very air seemed more vibrant. And I, with nothing stronger in me than food and water, felt a little of that hallucinatory state that Joel Agee describes in such a terrifyingly beautiful way.
   
   This is a book that unerringly organizes tangled events that, in and of themselves are seemingly random, into an inarguable order; with unexpected deadpan humor, uncanny understanding of the connections between loved ones, and a feel of a great and necessary quest. It was a joy and a privilege for me to read, and an honor to be able to present Joel Agee...
   
   I cannot recommend this book highly enough...



4. Anyone who lived through the Sixties and has any sembalance of rememberance about those years should read this book. Agee's experiences and recollections are nothing short of amazing, and his unique insights into the metaphysical side of life and things is stunning. In the House of My Fear is a classic.



5. A friend sent me this book including a claim that it had helped him find "himself." He asked me to read it. I did and I am fighting the impulse to suggest my budy seek counseling. The book is about sex and drugs and the search for "Who am I?" Agee must have no shame revealing what is possibly the most uninteresting biographical history I've ever read. Perhaps all those 5 star reviews were children of the 60's and 70's who were remainded of the foolish culture created by sex and drugs. It was a fun time, but those of us who remember it should have grown up by now. Save your money: buy a comic book.

2 comments about Remember Me? / Te acuerdas de mi? (Bilingual Edition).

1. This is a great example for young children. The author was my little brothers 2nd and 3rd grade teacher and he absolutly loved her. Her book was just as good



2. Children tend to live in the present. This trait helps a young girl deal with her feelings of guilt about her grandfather's alzheimer's disease. As children often do, she thinks he doesn't want to remember her because of something terrible she did or said. There is a powerful message for parents to realize the possibility of this reaction in children. Talking about it helps.
   
   The child's tendency to live in the present and her grandfather's life without memories from the past, ends the book with a hopeful note as the two relate to each other on a new level.
   
   An added benefit is that the book has English and Spanish on each page. It also has a glossary to help readers of both languages.

No comments about Deafness: An Autobiography.