Miracle Boy Grows Up: How the Disability Rights Revolution Saved My Sanity (Skyhorse: 2012

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Books, articles, and publications to help widen personal perspectives and stimulate creative approaches to living with a spinal cord injury.

Consumer magazines such as New Mobility and Ability Magazine provide information on how to lead an active lifestyle. Topics range from disability access and rights to sexuality, employment, and new disability products. Special issues on ‘Wheels on Campus’ expand awareness and access for students with disabilities with everything from classroom accommodations, housing, extracurricular activities to studying abroad.

Books unique to spinal cord injury are also listed to provide more detailed information on adapting motor vehicles, managing autonomic dysreflexia, living healthily, enhancing safety and emergency preparedness, optimizing mobility at home and in the community, and improving communication with family and friends. Books on spinal cord injury intimacy and relationship building are included.

Also listed are a select group of medical journals and books that highlight the latest medical research and findings on spinal cord injury. 

Miracle Boy Grows Up: How the Disability Rights Revolution Saved My Sanity (Skyhorse: 2012 Ben Mattlin lives a normal, independent life. Why is that interesting? Because Mattlin was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a congenital muscle weakness from which he was expected to die in childhood. Not only did Mattlin survive, he became one of the first students in a wheelchair to attend Harvard, from which he graduated and became a professional writer. His advantage? Mattlin’s life happened to parallel the growth of the disability rights movement, so that in many ways he did not feel he was disadvantaged at all, merely different. Miracle Boy Grows Up is a witty, unsentimental memoir you won’t forget, told with engrossing intelligence and a unique perspective on living with a disability in the United States.