Best Special Needs Biographies

Defying every prognosis. , with grit and grace, Katherine and Jay, side by side, struggled to regain a life for Katherine as she re-learned to talk and eat and walk. In the midst of continuing hardships and struggles, both in body and mind, Katherine and Jay found what we all long to find...hope, hope that heals the most broken place, our souls. Now, eight years later, Katherine and Jay are stewarding their story of suffering, restoration, and Christ-centered hope in this broken world through their ministry Hope Heals. Jay and Katherine are a raw yet refreshing testimony to the unshakable trustworthiness of God amidst the unimaginable trials of life. ( David Platt, author of the New York Times bestseller Radical and president of the International Mission Board ). Hope Heals is a beautiful, true story that illustrates the love and protection God has for us even in the darkest times of our lives. This book isn’t just a moving story; it’s a song sung by two humble people and what they’ve learned about love when the cadence of their lives unexpectedly changed. I know Jay and Katherine, and I welcome this book, not just as a stirring account of facing tragedy but as a beautiful story of a couple’s relentless love---for God and for each other.

Lone Survivor meets Marley & Me in this inspiring buddy memoir of an extraordinary service dog whose enduring love brought a wounded soldier back to life. A Dog Called Hope is the incredible story of a remarkable service dog who brought a devastated warrior back from the brink. It is the story of an amazing dog with boundless loyalty who built bridges between his wheelchair-bound battle buddy and the rest of able-bodied humankind. As I waited for the C-130 Hercules transport aircraft to fire up its giant turbines, I ran my eye along the column of brother warriors lined up on this sunbaked tropical runway—each American, like me, dressed in unmarked combat fatigues. For a mission such as this, you never wear a mark of unit or rank or anything that might betray your identity, just in case things go wrong. Like my fellow warriors, I’d sanitized myself completely, removing all patches from my clothing and not carrying a single piece of ID or family memento, anything that might link me to my nationality or my unit. FARC’s narcotics-smuggling network stretches from the South American jungle as far north as the USA and east across the Atlantic into Europe. With an income of some $300 million a year and tens of thousands of armed fighters under its command, FARC is a well-armed battle-hardened force constrained by none of the normal rules of war. The competition between army and air force is merciless, and we’d never want it any other way, since the intense rivalry serves to sharpen both arms of the military, but I’d been with the SOAR for months now and I was getting to feel like very much one of the boys. Each wore the distinctive PATRIA badge on his left sleeve, a skull flanked by daggers with a cobra twined through its empty eye sockets. We were about to fly north into the remote and lawless Cordillera Central, a spine of jungle-clad mountains snaking into neighboring Colombia. Intelligence reports suggested that FARC was using the rivers there to traffic drugs from the heart of the rain forest to the outside world, with America as their likely end destination. The PATRIA boys planned to stake out one of those rivers, put a stop to any narcotics operations, and take prisoners from whom further intelligence could be garnered to help break the drug-trafficking network. Gradually, the massive hook-bladed propellers spooled up to speed, the avgas—aviation fuel—burning fierce and heady in the hot sludgy air. He’d told me that since I was serving with the SOAR, I’d get to wear the Night Stalkers flash as well as my Air Force Special Operations Badge. We mounted up the aircraft; I pulled on my helmet and fastened the strap beneath my chin, settling into the fold-down canvas seat. The aircraft executed a short climb, then thundered low and fast across the treetops, keeping below any radar. I was seated in the plane’s tail section, next to a massive heap of rucksacks secured to the floor by netting. We sped onward across the carpet of green, the wind noise and the throbbing roar of the turbines killing the chance of any chat. As I gazed out over the jungle, I reflected on what had brought me to this position—an air force guy embedded within an elite army unit. I hailed from a tiny, little-known outfit—the 10th Combat Weather Squadron, part of Air Force Special Operations Command. It’s learning how a hailstone forms with concentric rings, like a tree, and what makes it burst out the top of a cloud like popcorn and plummet to earth in a dark curtain of ice. My first assignment with the 10th Combat Weather was on attachment to the army’s 3rd Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. In due course I transferred from Fort Bragg to Hunter Army Airfield, the headquarters of the 3rd Battalion of the 160th Night Stalkers, and moved my family up there, too. I conjured statistics to predict how storms would impact visibility or communications, or how wind speeds at the different altitudes of a parachute jump might enable a squad of paratroopers to hit a landing zone pretty much simultaneously. Because sound travels more clearly through water than air, in damp, humid conditions I had to warn our guys that the enemy would hear us coming from much farther away. After prolonged rain, a river might be rendered too hazardous to cross, making our planned exit from a target unworkable. My final call—the weather call—would be made four to six hours ahead of the mission start time, which was just what I’d done today, here in Ecuador. Trained climatic observers, they’d transmit key data: wind direction and speed, air temperature, cloud types and height, and dew point. The dew point is the temperature at which the air becomes saturated with moisture, so fog or rain will form, impacting on visibility. There were thunderstorms every day over the Cordillera Central, and a bad downdraft could cause an aircraft to fall out of the sky or scatter injured parachutists across a wide swath of terrain. The inbound aircraft were close now, and unless I called it off, we risked having parachutists jumping out of the skies into a hellish hailstorm. As the hailstones had pounded onto the roof of our vehicle, I’d felt the SOAR guys staring at me and known what they were thinking: How the hell did he get it so wrong? Sure enough, the hail had stopped, we’d gotten the parachutists in, and the last set of boots had barely hit the ground when the weather window closed again. I’d brought with me a small disposable camera, and I asked my buddy Travis to take a photo of me perched at the aircraft’s open ramp, my hand on my M4 assault rifle and my eyes gazing out over the rolling green canopy of jungle. Shortly after that photo was taken, we piled off the C-130’s open ramp, a string of sticklike figures tumbling into the void. I thrilled to the intellectual rigor of the combat weatherman’s craft, plus I welcomed the physical challenge and the buzz of jumping into missions with the SOAR. Then we began the long trek toward our end destination: a fast and angry river that snaked and boiled through the jungle.

In January 1988 Martin Pistorius, aged twelve, fell inexplicably sick. Martin's parents were told an unknown degenerative disease left him with the mind of a baby and less than two years to live. In these pages, readers see a parent’s resilience, the consequences of misdiagnosis, abuse at the hands of cruel caretakers, and the unthinkable duration of Martin’s mental alertness betrayed by his lifeless body. He loves animals, is a keen photographer, enjoys watching cricket, Formula 1 Grand Prix and films, listening to music, spending time with friends and, most of all, being with his wife.

It’s truly moving, eye-opening, incredibly vivid.”—Jon Stewart, The Daily Show NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY. NPR • The Wall Street Journal • Bloomberg Business • Bookish. Written by Naoki Higashida, a very smart, very self-aware, and very charming thirteen-year-old boy with autism, it is a one-of-a-kind memoir that demonstrates how an autistic mind thinks, feels, perceives, and responds in ways few of us can imagine. Using an alphabet grid to painstakingly construct words, sentences, and thoughts that he is unable to speak out loud, Naoki answers even the most delicate questions that people want to know. In his introduction, bestselling novelist David Mitchell writes that Naoki’s words allowed him to feel, for the first time, as if his own autistic child was explaining what was happening in his mind. “It is no exaggeration to say that The Reason I Jump allowed me to round a corner in our relationship.” This translation was a labor of love by David and his wife, KA Yoshida, so they’d be able to share that feeling with friends, the wider autism community, and beyond. Andrew Solomon is the author of several books including Far From the Tree and The Noonday Demon . David Mitchell: Autism comes in a bewildering and shifting array of shapes, severities, colors and sizes, as you of all writers know, Dr. Solomon, but the common denominator is a difficulty in communication. While not belittling the Herculean work Naoki and his tutors and parents did when he was learning to type, I also think he got a lucky genetic/neural break: the manifestation of Naoki's autism just happens to be of a type that (a) permitted a cogent communicator to develop behind his initial speechlessness, and (b) then did not entomb this communicator by preventing him from writing. Language, sure, the means by which we communicate: but intelligence is to definition what Teflon is to warm cooking oil. I guess that people with autism who have no expressive language manifest their intelligence the same way you would if duct tape were put over your mouth and a 'Men in Black'-style memory zapper removed your ability to write: by identifying problems and solving them. The only other regular head-bender is the rendering of onomatopoeia, for which Japanese has a synaesthetic genius – not just animal sounds, but qualities of light, or texture, or motion. DM: Their inclusion was, I guess, an idea of the book's original Japanese editor, for whom I can't speak. But for me they provide little coffee breaks from the Q&A, as well as showing that Naoki can write creatively and in slightly different styles. DM: Naoki has had a number of other books about autism published in Japan, both prior to and after Jump . This involves him reading 2a presentation aloud, and taking questions from the audience, which he answers by typing. (I happen to know that in a city the size of Hiroshima, of well over a million people, there isn't a single doctor qualified to give a diagnosis of autism.). It’s truly moving, eye-opening, incredibly vivid.” —Jon Stewart, The Daily Show “Please don’t assume that The Reason I Jump is just another book for the crowded autism shelf. This is an intimate book, one that brings readers right into an autistic mind—what it’s like without boundaries of time, why cues and prompts are necessary, and why it’s so impossible to hold someone else’s hand. This book takes about ninety minutes to read, and it will stretch your vision of what it is to be human.” —Andrew Solomon, The Times (U.K.). [Naoki Higashida’s] startling, moving insights offer a rare look inside the autistic mind.” — Parade. With about one in 88 children identified with an autism spectrum disorder, and family, friends, and educators hungry for information, this inspiring book’s continued success seems inevitable.” — Publishers Weekly “We have our received ideas, we believe they correspond roughly to the way things are, then a book comes along that simply blows all this so-called knowledge out of the water. Once you understand how Higashida managed to write this book, you lose your heart to him.” — New Statesman (U.K.) “Astonishing. In Mitchell and Yoshida’s translation, [Higashida] comes across as a thoughtful writer with a lucid simplicity that is both childlike and lyrical. Higashida is living proof of something we should all remember: in every autistic child, however cut off and distant they may outwardly seem, there resides a warm, beating heart.” — Financial Times (U.K.) “Higashida’s child’s-eye view of autism is as much a winsome work of the imagination as it is a user’s manual for parents, carers and teachers. “ The Reason I Jump is a wise, beautiful, intimate and courageous explanation of autism as it is lived every day by one remarkable boy. Naoki Higashida takes us ‘behind the mirror’—his testimony should be read by parents, teachers, siblings, friends, and anybody who knows and loves an autistic person. I only wish I’d had this book to defend myself when I was Naoki’s age.” —Tim Page, author of Parallel Play and professor of journalism and music at the University of Southern California “[Higashida] illuminates his autism from within.

But when her second child is born with albinism, a rare genetic condition whose most striking characteristics are white blonde hair, pale skin and impaired vision, she discovers that the very definition of normal is up for grabs.

Now free from the constraints of running, Hillary takes you inside the intense personal experience of becoming the first woman nominated for president by a major party in an election marked by rage, sexism, exhilarating highs and infuriating lows, stranger-than-fiction twists, Russian interference, and an opponent who broke all the rules. In these pages, she describes what it was like to run against Donald Trump, the mistakes she made, how she has coped with a shocking and devastating loss, and how she found the strength to pick herself back up afterward. It is a candid and blackly funny account of her mood in the direct aftermath of losing to Donald J. Trump. Ultimately, the book might be a historical artifact most of all — the chronicling of what, exactly, it was like to run for president as the first woman major-party candidate (and, yes, a Clinton as well). Plenty may disagree with Clinton’s opinions on what went wrong for her, but her story will still be an important part of that history when America looks back on the melee that was the 2016 election.” —. NPR. While What Happened records the perspective of a pioneer who beat an unprecedented path that stopped just shy of the White House, it also covers territory that many women will recognize.... She demonstrates that she can mine her situation for humor.” — People.

A Goodreads Choice Awards nominee. David Sedaris tells all in a book that is, literally, a lifetime in the making For forty years, David Sedaris has kept a diary in which he records everything that captures his attention-overheard comments, salacious gossip, soap opera plot twists, secrets confided by total strangers. These are the three stages that all artists - with some variation - go through in their careers...So it's encouraging to read 25 years of David Sedaris's diaries, and not just because he manages to defeat Bloat. But through all 25 years of "Theft by Finding" - of soap opera addictions and spider feeding, family kookiness (Sedaris notes the day Charles Addams dies; it feels like the passing of a baton) and language lessons - Sedaris's developing voice is the lifeline that pulls him through the murk." Yet David Sedaris has somehow pulled it off...with eviscerating wit and radiant humanity...Fans will no doubt delight in the entries that will turn into Sedaris's most beloved essays." "Sedaris fans will thrill to this opportunity to poke around in the writer's personal diaries, which he has faithfully kept for four decades and used as raw material for his hilarious nonfiction as well as his performances." "Sedaris' diaries are the wellspring for his cuttingly funny autobiographical essays, and he now presents a mesmerizing volume of deftly edited passages...Sedaris is caustically witty about his bad habits and artistic floundering...A candid, socially incisive, and sharply amusing chronicle of the evolution of an arresting comedic artist." "A David Sedaris book is always a welcome addition to any personal library - his hilarity, his self-deprecation, his compassion for (and amusement with) the human condition, and his clear joy at making his readers laugh out loud are all what make a David Sedaris book great.

Living in a tent even through brutal winters, he had survived by his wits and courage, developing ingenious ways to store edibles and water, and to avoid freezing to death. It is a gripping story of survival that asks fundamental questions about solitude, community, and what makes a good life, and a deeply moving portrait of a man who was determined to live his own way, and succeeded. MICHAEL FINKEL is the author of True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa , which was adapted into a 2015 major motion picture.