Disabilities in The Books Store

When Anne Ford learned that her daughter Allegra's "differences" were the result of severe learning disabilities, she faced a challenge that neither money nor position could ease. Desperate for answers and for help, she sought out doctors, schools, tutors, and summer camps and became an activist in national organizations to help children with LD and their families. In time Anne saw her child grow into a vibrant, loving, independent adult with a passion for ice skating and a commitment to help other children with disabilities.

While Allegra's disabilities are unique (as with each LD child), the feelings of pain, frustration, shame, and guilt felt by Anne are shared to a varying degree by all parents of an LD child, which is why she wanted to write this book. An estimated 3 million children in American schools have learning disabilities. To help these families, Anne shares her story and includes a resource section on specific issues affecting LD children, with an emphasis on the emotional, rather than the clinical, ways in which parents and families can respond, including:

In Elijah's Cup, Paradiz tells the powerful story of her family's struggle with her son's disease, one characterized by social awkwardness, literal-mindedness, and a fixation with particular subjects and interests. Like attention deficit disorder (ADD), dyslexia, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, Asperger's has exploded in diagnosis in the last decade, reconfiguring the known incidence of autism in the population with estimates as high as one in fifty people.

Ever since autism was "discovered" by researchers in the 1940s, the disability has been under the strict purview of professionals in medicine, psychiatry, and education. Like the deaf community, autistics themselves have had little voice in expressing their real experience and needs. They were framed as too "sick" to be conscious of their own internal lives, too "mentally ill" to possess an identity. All this has changed.

Today there is a blossoming movement of autistic self-advocacy groups and alliances that pose challenging questions to the medical status quo. A fascinating, independent expression of another way of life, full of quirkiness, hardship, and humor, has emerged. Elijah's Cup is a provocative and pioneering book that pushes the envelope of what we know about autism. Were Andy Warhol, Albert Einstein, and the comedian Andy Kaufman, whom we usually think of as brilliant eccentrics, autistic? Can these figures serve as role models to this community?

Elijah's Cup offers a refreshing take on mental disability from the perspective of civil rights, history, and the arts. From encounters with the founders of the first civil rights organizations for autistics, who guide Paradiz and her son toward a sense of community and self-respect, and with visual artists, who share with Elijah their special ability to "think in pictures," Elijah reaches extraordinary heights in his sociability and emotional well-being.