BiblioVault - Books about Living

Deaf-Blind Reality

Living the Life

Scott M. Stoffel

Gallaudet University Press, 2012

Most stories about disabled people are written for the sake of being inspirational. These stories tend to focus on some achievement, such as sports or academics, but rarely do they give a true and complete view of the challenges individuals must deal with on a daily basis. For example: How does a deaf-blind person interact with hearing-sighted people at a family reunion? How does she shop for groceries? What goes through his mind when he enters a classroom full of non-handicapped peers? These aren’t questions you are likely to find answers to while reading that incredible tale of success. They are, however, issues that a deaf-blind person wishes others understood.

Deaf-Blind Reality: Living the Life explores what life is really like for persons with a combination of vision and hearing loss, and in a few cases, other disabilities as well. Editor Scott M. Stoffel presents extensive interviews with 12 deaf-blind individuals, including himself, who live around the world, from Missouri to New Zealand, Louisiana to South Africa, and Ohio to England. These contributors each describe their families’ reactions and the support they received; their experiences in school and entering adulthood; and how they coped with degeneration, ineffective treatments, and rehabilitation. Each discusses their personal education related to careers, relationships, and communication, including those with cochlear implants. Deaf-Blind Reality offers genuine understanding of the unspectacular but altogether daunting challenges of daily life for deaf-blind people.

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Dena'inaq' Huch'ulyeshi

The Dena'ina Way of Living

Edited by Suzi Jones, James Fall, and Aaron Leggett

University of Alaska Press, 2013

The range of the Dena’ina people stretches from the Cook Inlet region to southcentral Alaska and has been established for a thousand years. Yet their culture has largely been overlooked, leaving large gaps in the literature. Dena’inaq’ Huch’ulyeshi, a new catalog of Dena’ina materials, is an ambitious project that finally brings their culture to light.

Lavishly illustrated with more than six hundred photographs, maps, and drawings, Dena’inaq’ Huch’ulyeshi contains 469 entries on Dena’ina objects in European and American collections. It is enriched with examples of traditional Dena’ina narratives, first-person accounts, and interviews. Thirteen essays on the history and culture of the Athabascan people put the pieces into a larger historical context. This catalog is a comprehensive reference that will also accompany a large-scale exhibition running September 2013 through January 2014 at the Anchorage Museum.

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Dwelling in Resistance

Living with Alternative Technologies in America

Schelly, Chelsea

Rutgers University Press, 2017

Most Americans take for granted much of what is materially involved in the daily rituals of dwelling. In Dwelling in Resistance, Chelsea Schelly examines four alternative U.S. communities—“The Farm,” “Twin Oaks,” “Dancing Rabbit,” and “Earthships”—where electricity, water, heat, waste, food, and transportation practices differ markedly from those of the vast majority of Americans.

Schelly portrays a wide range of residential living alternatives utilizing renewable, small-scale, de-centralized technologies. These technologies considerably change how individuals and communities interact with the material world, their natural environment, and one another. Using in depth interviews and compelling ethnographic observations, the book offers an insightful look at different communities’ practices and principles and their successful endeavors in sustainability and self-sufficiency.

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