No comments about Why Me-Why Not: My Experience with Sarcoma Cancer.

No comments about Ordinary Daylight: Portrait of an Artist Going Blind.

5 comments about Nothing But Time.

1. Ms. Ayyildiz book is about life and love and family and trauma and survival. It is for any who have faced the very hard times life throws at us. Judy tells her survival in voices of those who shape her life, with tears and laughter.



2. Ms. Ayyildiz book is about life and love and family and trauma and survival. It is for any who have faced the very hard times life throws at us. Judy tells her survival in voices of those who shape her life, with tears and laughter.



3. I was looking forward to this book, as my family has gone through several severe illnesses, including Guillane-Barre. I was very disappointed in both her writing (I found it hard to follow at times) and in her attitude (towards her family and health care providers). She was in the hospital for 5 days and seemed to yell at someone at least once a day; my husband was in for 3 months and, albeit justifiably stressed at times, was pleasant and thankful to his caregivers. It is rare that I do not finish a book once I've started it; this one was not worth my time.



4. Another survivor of GBS, who is also a writer

   Only several thousand Americans get this hard-to-diagnose, hard-to-understand disease each year. It continues to baffle doctors and researchers. The excellent writer that she is, Judy Ayyildiz unfolds her horror story of paralysis with characteristic gentleness and sensitivity. Because she interweaves childhood and family memories into her GBS story, which lends interest to the tale, a speed reader is apt to get confused. This is one book you cannot skim.

   Judy writes descriptively of the fear this unpredictable disease/syndrome brings. She relates how families struggle to deal with it and lend the kind of support needed by the patient, who spends many lonely hours isolated from family members who don't seem to understand. Her book title, Nothing But Time is dead on. The disease wipes you out, leaving you utterly tired and weak.




5. Overcoming a serious life-changing disease is never easy. This book takes readers on a journey from onset and diagnosis to recovery and survival. Along the way the author shares her thoughts and feelings about being a patient. Readers will enjoy listening to family stories and absorbing the sights, smells, and sounds of Judy's native Appalachian region.
   
   Ann Brandt,
   Broomfield, Colorado

2 comments about Just a Krooked Kid.

1. After doing an Amazon search of the word "arthrogryposis", I found Goodwin Hale's book. I am a mother of a son with this condition and so I was interested in reading about Mr. Hale's life. His story is really inspirational and I was constantly stopping to read my husband excerpts from this book. The writing is lively and he has many amusing antecdotes about his growing up years. I am anxious to have my son read it. He is 15 and I think he will be able to relate to Mr. Hale's stories, although he did not grow up in a small town during the depression as Mr. Hale did. Despite the generational difference, his daily life as someone with arthrogryposis will be familiar to anyone with this condition. I would highly recommend his book for anyone with a loved one with this condition- they will be inspired by Mr. Hale. I would also recommend this book to anyone who just wants a positive read, many smiles and inspiration of someone that had difficult challenges from birth.



2. My baby daughter was born with the condition arthrogryposis and I was keen to read about anothers experiences.
   
   The story of Goodwins life was indeed a positive one and filled me with hope for my little girls future. Medical practices and society at large has moved on since goodwins childhood but it is an interesting insight into how the condition affected his every day life and how he overcame his obstacles and limitations.
   
   The book had a general 'heartwarming' feel about it, and has a few funny exerpts as well. The book is the only biography I know of written by someone with arthrogryposis at present, and is a nice alternative to the medical based texts that can often paint a bleak picture of this condition.
   
   The only problem with this book I found, is, as mentioned earlier, a lot has changed since Goodwins childhood and he grew up in a very different era, so it is hard to compare this to what my daughter will go through. However, there will still be much that she and I will relate to as she grows, such as how he negotiated his way around the house and feeding issues! This is a very personal opinion due to my circumstances, despite this, I would still recommend the book to to people either with the condition or to people who's loved ones are affected.
   
   I will give this book to my daughter to read someday and I am currently passing it about family and friends who want a read also!
   
   Overall a very inspirational read!

5 comments about Speak to Me: Grief, Love and What Endures.

1. To face your fears, to really dig down deep and write from the heart, is the biggest challenge for any writer. Marcie Hershman more than scales a mountain in SPEAK TO ME. This book is smart and serious yet it ends with such hope and joy, I was sad to put it down. Bravo! A beautiful tribute and memoir.



2. Marcie Hershman's Speak to Me is simply one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. On one level this is "about" the death of a beloved sibling; on its other levels, it engages us in the power of the human voice to speak in so many ways about love -- the love that moves us out of grief and into a richer sense of our lives. That we might hear again our loved one's voice in dreams, or "play" that voice again on audio tape, or have it echo again in memory, and that there are mysteries, too--voice after death--all these aspects of our connection to each other Marcie Hershman reminded me of. She has wit, wisdom and an honesty that reveals the heart of the matter. Her ten meditations, so gorgeously written, and so deeply felt, told me not only about the special bond she and her brother Rob shared, but of the bond I too have felt with family members I have lost. There are so many voices I still long to hear. I am extraordinarily glad to have read Speak to Me. I urge others to read it and share it. This is beautiful, heart-stirring work!



3. I read Marcie Hershman's book to give me insight on grief and mourning. Although the topic of voice is intriguing & often neglected, I found the writing to be very dry and difficult to read. The book is brief (100 pages) but for me, I found it hard be propelled forward with detailed descriptions of metaphysical topics. It was excrutiatingly dull for me to complete this short book.



4. Not many books deal with the loss of a sibling and how the death of a brother or sister changes the way you see the world. I found this book extremely helpful to me, although I did not lose a brother, but my husband of sixteen years. Once I started reading, I couldn't put this book down. I started in the afternoon and kept reading through the night. I felt like I was having a heart to heart talk with a good friend. I was happy by how different it was from the usual "how to get over grief" type of book, full of rules and advice. Highly recommended.



5. My brother died almost three years ago, but it took me almost two years of Marcie Hershman's book sitting on my bedside table to get up the courage to read more than a few pages now and then. I finally finished the whole thing today, in one sitting, and am sorry now that I waited. It has been cathartic, enabling me to mourn and to cry in a way that I couldn't before. Her book is full of gentleness, love and writing that flows straight from her pen into our heart. In "Speak to Me" she crosses over boundaries and in between worlds as if they are water. Dreams, spiritual thought, a sometimes complicated childhood and the here and now of her brother Rob's TV producing - she does not limit herself because the story is not one of limits, but of expansion. She has touched a chord that those of us who have lost somebody can identify with. There are many of us who have probably heard the voices, and dreampt dreams about loved ones who are gone. Marcie Hershman, who writes so lovingly about her brother's voice, is, in fact, OUR collective voice to the world.

1 comments about On My Own Terms: My Journey with Asperger's.

1. This book is a rare gem and a recently discovered treasure. In addition to being well written, one can identify with much of what the author has chosen to share. It provides a much needed window with parted curtains into autism/Asperger's (a/A) perceptions and interpretations.
   
   This book has appendices and additional insights that are not included in this author's previous work, "Overcoming Asperger's." The text from the original book in its entirety is included in this one. The only difference between the books other than the titles is the inclusion of the appendices.
   
   It has been said and evidence appears to support the finding that people on the a/A spectrum learn empathy cognitively as opposed to intuitively. Seeing the view from another person's perspective is challenging for most people, but for those on the a/A spectrum it is all the more so.
   
   This book is one that commands respect; being able to disclose the level of information that is found in this book is nothing short of courageous. It is the voice of hope for those with any form of autism; for professionals and for those personally involved with people on the a/A spectrum. This is a book for everybody! Being able to share these insights and observations made me think of the song "Climb Every Mountain" from "The Sound of Music."
   
   Hats off to this book!

No comments about Dementia: the Loss . . . the Love . . . the the Loss . . . the Love . . . the Laughter.

2 comments about How I Became a Human Being: A Disabled Man's Quest for Independence (Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography).

1. September 1955. Six-year-old Mark O'Brien moved his arms and legs for the last time. He came out of a thirty-day coma to find himself enclosed from the neck down in an iron lung, the machine in which he would live for much of the rest of his life.

   How I Became a Human Being is Mark O'Brien's account of his struggles to lead an independent life despite a lifelong disability. In 1955, he contracted polio and became permanently paralyzed from the neck down. O'Brien describes growing up without the use of his limbs, his adolescence struggling with physical rehabilitation and suffering the bureaucracy of hospitals and institutions, and his adult life as an independent student and writer. Despite his weak physical state, O'Brien attended graduate school, explored his sexuality, fell in love, published poetry, and worked as a journalist. A determined writer, O'Brien used a mouthstick to type each word.

   O'Brien's story does not beg for sympathy. It is rather a day-to-day account of his reality?the life he crafted and maintained with a good mind, hired attendants, decent legislation for disabled people in California, and support from the University of California at Berkeley. He describes the ways in which a paralyzed person takes care of the body, mind, and heart. What mattered most was his writing, the people he loved, his belief in God, and his belief in himself.

   Mark O'Brien was the subject of the 1997 Academy Award?winning documentary Breathing Lessons. He was a published poet and cofounder of the Lemonade Factory, a California press that published poetry by people with disabilities. O'Brien died in 1999 at the age of forty-nine after completing a draft of How I Became a Human Being . Gillian Kendall is a writer. She has contributed to both Outright Radio and Sun magazine; one of her short stories appeared in The Student Body, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press.




2. "How I became a human being" is a great read. It is one of those books that I had trouble putting down, once I had begun reading it. Mark O'Brien is a truely inspirational person, who proves that if you set your mind to something, you can achieve whatever you want to in life despite, in his case, extraordinary obstacles. I simply can't imagine being paralysed from the neck down. What amazed me while reading the book, was that at times, I forgot that Mark had such a profound disabilty, with his humour, personality and love coming through in his writing.
   My only criticism of this book is that there was no mention at any point of Mark's realization that he would never walk again, that he would forever be reliant on others and indeed be reliant on an iron lung. When was he first told he would never walk again? How did he and his parents react to this news? Did he live in hope that by some miracle, he would walk again or did he accept that this was the way he was going to be for the rest of his life? After finishing the book, I felt that these questions were left largely unanswered.
   Also, as Mark O'Brien died in 1999, I felt that it would have been good for the co-writer to have written an epilogue regarding the circumstances of his death. Throughout the book Mark comes close to death on several occasions and he talks about death in quite some detail, but the reader is left with no details of the actual circumstances in which he died.
   Despite these criticisms, I recommend this book highly. It is an amazingly inspirational read.

No comments about One Sad Ungathered Rose: Schizophrenia - A Mother's Story.

5 comments about Stephen Hawking A Life in Science.

1. I am an enormous fan of Stephen Hawking, his achievements in physics are incredible and his ability to overcome his illness demonstrates how sturdy the human mind can be. He is touted in the book as the greatest mind since Einstein, which is a claim I also recently read concerning Richard Feynman. I have no opinion on this, as I hold them both in very high regard. To me such debates are silly, as ranking such people is so subjective that it is meaningless and wasteful.
   That aside, I generally enjoyed the book, finding the explanations of the physics a little too simplistic for my tastes, but certainly within the realm of the general reader. My only real criticism is that there was too much ink spent on some of the minutiae of his life. Even Hawking probably objects to some of the details about his life that appear. However, I was pleased to read that he can be temperamental and shows his anger by running over a person's foot with his wheelchair. It just makes him sound that much more human.
   This is a good biography of a great man, who lets nothing get in his way. An inspiration who probably does not want the role in any capacity other than as a physicist, he has revolutionized cosmology and it will be a minimum of decades before all the consequences of his work will be known.



2. Stephen Hawking A Life In Science by Michael White and John Gibbons does a fantastic job of combining both the story of Stephen Hawkings's life and in depth explanations of his scientific work and findings. The story of Hawking's life is told starting from his very early childhood and progress through his schooling and career. The book discusses the people and events in Hawking's early life that influenced him to work in the field of Cosmology. The book also addresses the discoveries and theories that Hawking developed in his studies. The theories are explained in plenty of detail but the authors do a good job in making them as easy to understand a possible. The story of Hawking's life itself is truly amazing because of the significant discoveries he made despite his disability. The book is worth while fro anyone who want s to learn about Stephen Hawking and wants to learn a bit about his discoveries and why they are significant. Although the authors do try to keep the explanations simple, there are some parts that are hard to understand without a decent knowledge of physic's principles. Even so, the book is still well written and the story it tells is fascinating.



3. Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science is an excellent biography which presents one of the most celebrated physicists, Stephen Hawking, in an elegant and expressive manner. Michael White tells of the significant events that greatly influenced Stephen King's life, for example the disease that crippled him but he fought valiantly enough to delay his later death. White wrote in a way which kept the readers attention. It had the basic theories that an average reader could fully understand, but the book did not go in depth with the scientific reasoning behind the theories.
   Overall, I generally liked the book even though at times the book seemed to go on forever. I have to say I honestly learned quite a lot about his theories of black holes etc. The overcoming of his disease inspired me because it showed how strong he wanted to finish work. I would suggest this book to other readers because there is a lot of information that can be understood. It is a pretty long read but it flows pretty nicely especially if you like the science genre.



4. The story of Stephen Hawking that is told in the book is not only extremely informative but also very Physics based. The motivations for the author to write the story are obvious, due to famous nature of the subject that is Stephen Hawking. And the reason for being famous is different to just about every other situation possibly imaginable. The reason for reading this book is not confined to those that are interested in Physics. The book is written in a nature that allows all people to read and understand it. it show people where Stephen Hawking had been and what he had done before he become disabled from his disease, as well as allowed people to better understand and appreciate him as a person in society growing up and not as someone that was different from all other people. it can give some hope to those that do not believe that they will be able to do something with there lives and allows the idea of a chance of success



5. --This is a story about one man who has changed man's view on the universe, about one man who miraculously survives......
   
   Spending more than twenty years of life on a wheelchair, Stephen Hawking has revealed the most intriguing part of the whole universe, through his groundbreaking discovery in black holes. Considered "the successor of Einstein", Hawking attempted to combine quantum mechanics and relativity, two contradictory theories, breaking a new path for scientists to reveal the nature of physics. But perhaps the most fascinating part of Hawking's miracle is his fight and resistance to his illness, which, according to the doctors, would have ended his life by the age of 21. Despite huge difficulties of moving and speaking, Hawking has never given up himself, and neither has his wife, Jane, who helped Hawking go through the most difficult time of his life. The authors are inspired by Hawking's tenacity and spirit, and also will every one who will read Hawking's life through this book. After reading the book, one would understand, as what the authors hope, what contribute to Hawking's success--not only his genius and incisive intuition, but also fortitude and a positive attitude toward life. This book perfectly blends theories of physics and the universe with Hawking's life, depicting a colorful and unique picture to help understand the indefatigable scientist.