1. ISBN13: 9781932603729
2. Condition: NEW
3. Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Editorial Review :

Customer Review :

Expert Comprehensive Discussion of Causes, Treatments, and Outcomes of This Wasting Disease

Hiroshi Misumoto, MD, author of this book, has assembled articles from experts in all areas surrounding ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). While it can become fairly technical in scope for the home user, it is an encyclopedic reference for those who suffer from the disease and those who care for them.

Usually, I avoid books with articles from many experts because often these articles are simply filler that make a short book appear long. Such is not the case with this book. Each expert has contributed advice from his or her field of experience and knowledge concerning ALS. Every issue of treatment and care is covered in this book, and there is enough information to help the patient and caregiver ask the physician specific questions and be knowledgeable enough to understand the answers.

I imagine that reading Amyotropic Lateral Sclerosis will appear daunting at first to many. However, the information is presented in readable fashion once you get started. Each subject area, covered in chapter format, can be tackled as needed, so you don't have to attempt to read this book through in a very short time.

Hats off to Mitsumoto for a well-researched, well-presented volume.



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Good Resource

Comprehensive, current and clear resource for patients and caregivers. A variety of authors cover a practical and emotional issues in a series of caring and well written chapters.

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AMYOTROPHIC LATERAL SCLEROSIS

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis: A Guide for Patients and Families IT'S A LITTLE TECHNICAL, BUT SURE TELLS YOU WHAT WANT YOU WANT TO KNOW. I WILL FIND OUT TOMORROW IF I HAVE IT,

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A top pick for those who want to be armed with the knowledge they need to deal with the disease

Lou Gehrig's disease cut short the career of a baseball icon and has cut short the lives of thousands since. "Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis: A Guide for Patients and Families" is a guide for victims and families of Lou Gehrig's disease and how to deal with this incurable, but treatable disease. From symptoms to medicine, to more, "Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis" is a top pick for those who want to be armed with the knowledge they need to deal with the disease.


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Excellent Resource

I used this book religiously before my dad passed away from complications due to ALS last July. The book was very helpful to understand what was happening and what was coming. As depressing as it all is, it was better to understand the situation so I could do all I could to help my loved one. I was just looking at my copy the other day and the amount of highlighting in it and stickies hanging out of it reminded me of how used the book was.

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Editorial Review :

A wonderful resource for travelers who use wheelchairs, scooters, or walkers, There Is Room at the Inn contains a delightful array of intimate, accessible lodgings throughout the nation. Grouped geographically by state, this guide features 118 lodgings in 40 states, ranging from Victorian inns and quaint B&Bs to mountain retreats, a dude ranch, and even two safari parks. Each profile includes the property's access details, with emphasis on features in the accessible guestrooms; comments from the innkeepers about access; and accessible sight-seeing suggestions. A handy checklist allows travelers to screen other potential choices. An additional chapter for innkeepers offers insight into this growing market and suggestions on making their property appeal to travelers with limited mobility.

Customer Review :

An extensive and reliable guide for identifying and booking ideal locations for physically disinclined people

There Is Room At The Inn: Inns And B And Bs For Wheelers And Slow Walkers by Candy B. Harrington is a resource and travel planning compendium of thoroughly researched information on Inn and B&B accommodations throughout America. An extensive and reliable guide for identifying and booking ideal locations for physically disinclined people traveling anywhere in the country, Candy Harrington has compiled and expertly organized an informative grouping of handicap accessible Inn and B&B lodgings by state. There Is Room At The Inn notes important details regarding the access features of each inn and B&B guest room, while offering useful comments from innkeepers regarding their own attitudes about access. Additionally enhanced with suggestions for easily-accessed sights in surrounding areas, and a checklist of questions for travelers to ask innkeepers, There Is Room At The Inn is very strongly recommended for anyone in need of a comprehensive and accurate information resource on America's most handicap accessible inns, suites, B&Bs, dude ranches, safari parks, and mountain retreats.


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Bible of Handicap Travel

This book is a must for anyone who is challenged, needs a wheelchair or is a slow walker, which includes many senior citizens who love to visit inns and bed and breakfast places for their nostalgia. Most of these travelers have found it difficult in a previous inn or b&b and have decided not to try any others. However, with great research and care for detailed descriptions of handicap services and amenities available, Candy Harrington has opened a whole wonderful world of travel to the challenged traveler, one that is most comforting as well as accessible. She describes these places even in safari parks and most unexpected places.This is a MUST for any slow traveler or wheelchair traveler. Excellent!

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Good information

We haven't used this one yet, but looking it over shows how much is out there that we didn't know about. It is helpful that the book differentiates between "slow walkers" and "wheelers", as this is something that a lot of B&B hosts don't get. Too many think "accessible" is accessible to everyone & those of us who live with "wheelers" are often frustrated to find "it ain't so". This book will help us plan our vacations more carefully and yet not be stuck with typical look-alike chain hotel rooms.

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1. ISBN13: 9780393320428
2. Condition: NEW
3. Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Editorial Review :

Winner of the Columbia University Lionel Trilling Award. Robert Murphy was in the prime of his career as an anthropologist when he felt the first symptom of a malady that would ultimately take him on an odyssey stranger than any field trip to the Amazon: a tumor of the spinal cord that progressed slowly and irreversibly into quadriplegia. In this gripping account, Murphy explores society's fears, myths, and misunderstandings about disability, and the damage they inflict. He reports how paralysis—like all disabilities—assaults people's identity, social standing, and ties with others, while at the same time making the love of life burn even more fiercely.

Customer Review :

An incredible book by an incredible person...

This is one of my books that I bought and put aside to read later. I don't remember how long ago I bought it but I am certainly glad that I gave it a second chance to read it before discarding it. I am now not planning to sell this book, as it is too important a volume on disability in society, and it certainly applies to the bioethical and eduethical work I do on the side of my 'regular' job of teaching and writing.

Murphy is unlike me in that he came upon his disability later in life, while I was born basically deaf and remained that way for the first 13 years of my life before getting a hearing aid at the age of 13. Murphy had to deal with a slow-growing tumor that entwined itself into his spinal cord. Unlike many tumors that can be excised with surgery, his was such that the possibility of removing it also came with the possibility of losing everything else, including his life or the ability to continue to do his important work. Like many of us who have chosen not to take the risk of surgery and who don't believe that to be disabled is worse than to be dead, Murphy worked with and around his progressive disabling and was able to give the world another 15 years of his wisdom in cultural anthropology.

This book is a must-read for any person with a disability, no matter when they became disabled. Murphy had the background of an academic anthropologist, with many years of successful teaching and writing for major journals in anthropology and culture. He had also written major books, one of which continues to be used in most universities on women and gender in primitive societies. So in coming into the genre of disability studies, he brought to the field a first-rate mind and ability to write so others can understand difficult concepts.

Murphy's book is not the usual autobiography that one usually expects, but rather explores disability (specifically his, but he introduces others and also the culture) without a single shard of either self-pity or 'hey, look at me' attitude that is so often written about in media (where the media puts someone with a disability on a pedestal that is unrealistic of the very real problems that those of us with disabilities face daily). He writes presenting his disablement as a fait-accompli, dealing with the problems as they arose...and in some cases, he ignored his health situation to the point of putting him at risk for infection from bedsores because he was too busy teaching. Like Murphy states, that wasn't courage as often as it was just not wanting to take the time to have his physical body get in the way of what he was trying to do. In treating his disablement with this attitude, he did become the courageous person that he presented to the public...and I wish so badly I had had the opportunity to meet him and hear him speak. Like so many others such as Michael Fox and Christopher REeve, Murphy was a non-disabled person whose close encounters with his own disablement led him to become a voice in a minority that has long been voiceless. He died much too soon, but in giving his last fifteen years of work to physical disabilities in society, he has provided us with an ongoing voice. I certainly intend to use his words and his writing in my work in hopes that it will inspire others as it has inspired me.

Karen Sadler

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Hearing the Body

Bob became paraplegiac at a late age, after having enjoyed a long, brilliant career as a professor at Columbia and an anthropologist who, with his anthropologist wife Yolanda, lived among Amazonian Indians and Saharan camel nomads. He was too clever to be overwhelmed with self-pity. This book was written from the perspective that he loved most: what you'd think is true is probably just the opposite. We expect paralyzed people to get better, like other "sick" patients, but the problem is, they don't: they're damaged selves. Hey--just like everybody else. We all have to come to terms with life's damages and our isolation and loneliness as we attempt to cope with it. Who would ever have thought it possible--we can all learn something compelling about our normal selves, viewing life from the wheelchair! Ironically (and this is the kind of twist that styles Murphy's ideas) the disabled are a mirror for the rest of us: "The paralytic is, quite literally, a prisoner of the flesh, but most humans are convicts of sorts. We live within walls of our own making, staring out at life through bars thrown up by culture and annealed by our fears. . . .[that] induces a mental paralysis, a stilling of thought." Murphy has never sold his soul to an illusion: he speaks candidly as a participant observer of his own encounter with symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, and transformation. Always the fox, he transcends the smoke screen that our cultural prejudices force upon us, and hears his own body and its message with astounding clarity and patience. This is a book that students read eagerly, in both anthropology and sociology classes, because its message is provocative, and its ethnography is true. It teaches us all to listen to the sound of our own struggles with personal identity and mortality, and to smile with the knowledge that we are not alone.

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"The Body Silent" by Robert Murphy

Valuable insights into the world of the disabled from many angles by a respected professor with progressive spinal cord disease. Highly recommended to persons with disabilities and to the general public who often encounter them.

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Disibility means reliance on others

Ten years ago since the American Disabilities Act went into effect, the disabled still feel that they are isolated from the real world. Former professor of anthropology at Columbia University Robert F. Murphy examines from his personal perspective the life of a disabled person in a world where he was independent and zealous of life. The reader will discover what it is like for a disabled person to battle besides the inability to carry out everyday function we take for granted. The Body Silent is unlike other books written by the disable. The Body Silent is an excellent book full of prose and not journal entries of how fortunate the non-disabled really are. This book (recommended to me by anthropologist Dr. James Trostle) will change your perspective and outlook on how it is like to grow up again and learning how to walk, one step at a time.

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a celebration of life worth living

As a graduate student in anthropology, I came to know and respect Bob Murphy more than any other scholar. Of the texts he wrote, The Body Silent, stands apart in that it says much about the man, anthropology, disability in American society, and life itself. It will deeply touch a wide variety of readers, and for those that knew him, will bring tears to their eyes. As to its impact on what is now known as disability studies, it put the discipline on the academic agenda. As such, it is a seminal text and is a must for anyone thinking of entering the field.

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Editorial Review :

Quick Tips for Caregivers provides thorough instruction in basic caregiving procedures, gives cogent advice on safety, and presents practical suggestions to help caregivers reduce stress and obtain outside support. Topics include positioning someone in bed, personal care, infection control, nutrition, safe medication use, wheelchair use, fall prevention, and fire safety. The book is enriched with 47 illustrations. Available in English, Spanish and Chinese editions.

Customer Review :

A compendium of cogent, practical, experienced advice

Quick Tips For Caregivers provides the non-specialist general reader with a thorough and completely accessible course of instruction in basic caregiving procedures and techniques. The reader is presented a compendium of cogent, practical, experienced advice on methods for improving safety in the home as well as applicable suggestions for ways to reduce inevitable caregiver stress and obtain needed outside support. All aspects of home give provision are covered including medication management, nutrition, wheelchair concerns, fall prevention, fire safety, elder neglect and abuse. "Must" reading for anyone charged with homecare responsibility for an elderly or infirm family member, Quick Tips For Caregivers has a thoroughly "user friendly" text that is enhanced with forty-seven illustration (many of which describe care events that occur every day in home situations) as well as resources for caregiver support, hiring in-home help, communication, incontinence, glossary, a detailed index, and more.

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Reference for Caregivers

Covering some of the most important topics in Caregiving task. Good reference for our students in Caregiver Training Programme. [...]

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Packs in details for home caregivers

Quick Tips For Caregivers packs in details for home caregivers which cover the most basic levels of home health care; from how to position a patient in bed and how to give a bed bath and protect your back to preparing for a hospital discharge and hiring help. An exceptional guide for caregivers, especially those just starting out.

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1. ISBN13: 9780807070871
2. Condition: NEW
3. Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Customer Review :

An English Graduate............

I never had the 29 years of abled bodiness the author speaks about before she contacted MS - I've been severly crippled for five plus decades......she writes a good book, but again like most highly educated authors, people found in the in the communications arts, she overwhelms us with "dictionary words."

Dear author, in your next book, or a revised edition of this book, please allow us to put our thesaurus' away. Common literates would get more out of your books if you wrote without the imposing words.

I've accused other authors, who it is obvious, to have written like they wish to impress their peers at the university level. But you need not impress anyone but yourself, because your teaching the handicapped along with the "ables" that our world has meaning and purpose, is impressive enough.

Pardon my grammatical errors.........but it takes me a long time to type........and so I normally say forget it to rewriting.

The book is well worth the money.

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Must Read

This is a beautifully written book and one from which I learned a lot! It actually changed my world view. I wish it were required reading for everyone. I'm so glad I read it.

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Touching, moving and very sad

I had to read this book for one of my women's study's classes nearly 7 years ago. It has been too long to remember much of the detail but what I do remember is the depth of the impression that was left upon me. It is a very difficult task to look at someone's life, through their eyes, and experience their total destruction of being...slow....poignant...and startlingly real.

As we discussed this book in class, one of the girls ran out in tears, later coming back and disclosing that she, too, suffered from MS, making the book that much real and impressionable for me.

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Devastating honesty

Reviewer: robert dorroh from Sonora, CA United States Nancy Mairs, with devastating honesty, chronicles life as a cripple (her choice of word) in poignant essays in "Waist High in the World."

Beset with multiple sclerosis and bouts with clinical and situational depression, she offsets these stumbling blocks with joy, candor, eloquence, and cultural and political insights. It is a book for everybody, not just the disabled, for it challenges our fears, cultural hangups and citizenship: "The more perspectives that can be brought to bear on human experience, even from the slant of a wheelchair or a hospital bed, or through the ears of a blind person or the fingers of someone who is deaf, the richer that experience becomes." She attacks the stereotype that cripples must be passive and unfailingly polite in a culture that doesn't want to deal with them: "Beyond cheerfulness and patience, people don't expect much of a cripple's character."

Pondering her husband and caretaker George's battle with cancer, she offers a balanced look at suicide in the face of his death. Though she has attempted suicide "more than once," she questions the right-to-die movement, which extolls "rational" suicide: "Since hopelessness is a distinctive symptom of depression, which is an emotional disorder, actions carried out in a despairing state seem to me intrinsically irrational. This last time I clung to shreds of reason, which saved me." Still, she sees suicide as a possibility: "I want to be the one in charge of my life, including its end."

Why should society pay for the misfortunes of others? people ask. Because it's what human beings do: take care of one another, Mairs says, adding that it's the government's role to ensure that its citizens are entitled to the pursuit of happiness. Mairs notes that the abled-bodied should aim to preserve the dignity of the disabled. This takes in seeing them as sexual beings: ... "The general assumption, even among those who might be expected to know better, is that people with disabilities are out of the sexual running."

As a paraplegic, I admire her advocacy on my behalf. I admire her more, however, for her willingness to work toward the betterment of our society through a rare and gifted intelligence.

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A must read of people with a disability, especially MS

Having lived with MS for nearly 10 years and some of the disabling symptoms Ms. Mairs experiences I found her insights and perspective very helpful and enlightening. I think anyone with a disability, caretaker, or loved one of a person with a disabulity can get something out of this book. It articulates what life can be like for us, from the inside and with a superiorly articulate voice and perspective.

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