The emotional and practical experiences of parents of disabled children come together in this inspiring, comprehensive handbook. Up-to-date information and detailed discussions cover coping with the initial diagnosis and long-term emotional impact, finding the right medical treatment and support services, and getting financial and legal support if necessary.

Novelist and short story writer Jack London (1876-1916) contemplated the strange theory of astral travel, penning The Star Rover in 1914. The last of London's fifty books, which include White Fang and The Call of the Wild, The Star Rover centers on San Quentin prison inmate Darrell Standing, a former university professor who is serving a life sentence for murdering a colleague. To escape the tortures of his confinement, he withdraws into dreams of past lives in which he experiences what he calls his "eternal recurrence on earth." Thus the fantastic becomes a vehicle for exposing the social...

In a quiet rural village in late 19th-century France, an eleven-year-old boy is found dead in his room, sexually molested and strangled by an unknown assailant. The shocked townsfolk erupt in outrage: Who could have committed this horrible crime? Rumors immediately begin to fly and suspicions shift from one person to another as ignorant conjecture begins to feed on itself.

At first a vagrant is suspected; he could have come in through the open window while passing through the town at night. But in a matter of days another story begins to circulate: the culprit must be Simon, the Jewish...

Renowned Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy had an abiding interest in children and in children's literature. At the age of twenty-one, he started a school for peasant children on his family's estate, and after returning from a stint in the military, he founded another, experimental school with the motto, "Come when you like, leave when you like."
Fascinated by the simple charm and the fresh innocence with which the children of his schools told stories, several years later, when Tolstoy began writing about his own childhood, he emulated the uncomplicated narrative style and disarming directness...

Published at the beginning of the twentieth century, Mark Twain's humorous vision of the afterlife reflects the new scientific awareness of the awesome cosmos that confronts us and the feelings of insignificance this discovery produced.