Books about Disfigured from Amazon.com

"I spent five years of my life being treated for cancer, but since then I've spent fifteen years being treated for nothing other than looking different from everyone else. It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy of my life. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison."

At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates. In this strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit. Vividly portraying the pain of peer rejection and the guilty pleasures of wanting to be special, Grealy captures with unique insight what it is like as a child and young adult to be torn between two warring impulses: to feel that more than anything else we want to be loved for who we are, while wishing desperately and secretly to be perfect.

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Price: $5.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Ann Patchett and the late Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writer's Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In Grealy's critically acclaimed memior, Autobiography of a Face, she wrote about losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, years of chemotherapy and radiation, and endless reconstructive surgeries. In Truth & Beauty, the story isn't Lucy's life or Ann's life, but the parts of their lives they shared. This is a portrait of unwavering commitment that spans twenty years, from the long winters of the Midwest, to surgical wards, to book parties in New York. Through love, fame, drugs, and despair, this is what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined ... and what happens when one is left behind.

This is a tender, brutal book about loving the person we cannot save. It is about loyalty, and being lifted up by the sheer effervescence of someone who knew how to live life to the fullest.

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Price: $3.05 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This was no ordinary war. This was a war to make the world safe for democracy And if democracy was made safe, then nothing else mattered—not the millions of dead bodies, nor the thousands of ruined lives...This is no ordinary novel. This is a novel that never takes the easy way out: it is shocking, violent, terrifying, horrible, uncompromising, brutal, remorseless and gruesome...but so is war..
Price: $7.34 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Have you ever wondered why the Guggenheim is always covered in scaffolding? Why the random slashes on the exterior of Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum, supposed to represent Berlin locations where pre-war Jews flourished, reappear, for no apparent reason, on his Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto? Or why Frank Gehry's Stata Center, designed for MIT's top-secret Cryptography Unit, has transparent glass walls? Not to mention why, for $442 per square foot, it doesn't keep out the rain? You're not alone.

In Architecture of the Absurd, John Silber dares to peek behind the curtain of "genius" architects and expose their willful disdain for their clients, their budgets, and the people who live or work inside their creations. Absurdism in a painting or sculpture is one thing—if it's not to your taste, you don't have to look—but absurdism in buildings represents a blatant disregard for the needs of the building, whether it be a student center, music hall, or corporate headquarters.

Silber admires the precise engineering of Calatrava, the imaginative shapes of Gaudi, and the sleek beauty of Mies van der Rohe. But he refuses to kowtow to the egos of those "geniuses" who lack such respect for the craft. Absurdist architects have been sheltered by the academy, encouraged by critics, and commissioned by CEOs and trustees. They stamp the world with meaningless monstrosities, justify them with fanciful theories, and command outrageous "genius fees" for their trouble.

As a young man, Silber learned to draw blueprints and read elevations from his architect father. In twenty-five years as president of Boston University, Silber oversaw a building program totaling 13 million square feet. Here, Silber uses his experience as a builder, a client, and a noted philosopher to construct an unflinchingly intelligent illustrated critique of contemporary architecture.

Le Corbusier's megalomaniacal 1930s plan for Algiers, which called for the demolition of the entire city, was mercifully never built. But his blatant disregard for context and community lives on. In Boston, Josep Lluis Sert's unprotected northeast-facing entrance to the B.U. library flooded the first floor with snow and ice every New England winter. In Los Angeles, sunlight glinting off the sharply angled steel curves of Gehry's Walt Disney Music Hall raises the temperature of neighbors' houses by 15 degrees. And of course, Libeskind's World Trade Center plan, with its spindly 1776-foot tower and quarter-mile-high gardens, proved so impractical it had to be re-designed, in an exasperating negotiation hardly worthy of the complex tragedy of the site.

Dr. Silber, an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects, asks all the questions that critics dare not. He challenges architects to derive creative satisfaction from meeting their clients' practical needs. He appeals to the reasonable public to stop supporting overpriced architecture. And most of all, he calls for responsible clients to tell the emperors of our skylines that their pretensions cannot hide the naked absurdity of their designs. 103 color illustrations..
Price: $16.15 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The novel, Taylor's first, tell the outlaw tale of Trenchmouth Taggart, a man born and orphaned in 1903, a man nick-named for his live long oral affliction He picks up a gun during the West Virginia coal mine wars and spends the remainder of his years on the run, changing his identity and playing a mean harmonica. Trenchmouth Taggart's epic story, like the best ballads, etches its mark deep upon the memory..
Price: $6.97 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Ellie, twenty-year-old daughter of Mary Swan and Robbie Bartholomew, knows all about dashed dreams and waiting Because of a childhood accident that left her disfigured, Ellie has never been able to embrace the God of her parents Though Ellie doesn't understand the significance of the place, nor the mystery that seems to surround it, she agrees to travel with her mother to a site in Scotland known as the Dwelling Place. But when illness strikes, Ellie instead reluctantly moves back home to care for her mother. As she and her mother struggle to reconnect, Ellie begins to wonder why Mary Swan wanted to go to the Dwelling Place. Is there a dwelling place for Ellie as well? And does she have to travel halfway around the world to find it? From the author of the acclaimed The Swan House..
Price: $19.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD LEON SANDERS has a mug that looks like it should be hanging in a post office somewhere If he didn’t have his twisted sense of humor, he’d have nothing at all. So it’s no wonder to Leon and his friends that the gorgeous Amy Green will never even look twice at him.
However, there is one girl who might: Melody Hennon. Everyone at Zumner High keeps their distance from Melody because she was burned in a childhood accident. Leon has avoided her, too, until the day he tells her a bad joke and makes her laugh. Although Leon worries what people will think of him dating Melody, he’s happy to have someone in his life who thinks he’s special. That is, happy until Amy Green asks him out after Leon saves her from getting detention. Will Leon give up a shot with the Beauty so that he can live the fairy tale with the Beast?.
Price: $3.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Thomas Quicksilver, known to his classmates as "Pucker," has always been an outsider His crazy mother, the secret of his family’s strange origins, and above all, the terrible scars on his face from a childhood fire—these things have kept Thomas isolated and alone.

Now, at seventeen, a quest to save his dying mother takes Thomas back to his birthplace, an alternate world called Isaura from which he and his mother were exiled years earlier. In Isaura, Thomas’s scars will be magically healed. He will fall in love for the first time. And he will face a devastating, impossible choice.

In shimmering prose, Melanie Gideon’s new novel takes readers from the lonely places in a boy’s soul to a miraculous world of infinite possibility and frightening temptation.

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Price: $5.65 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This title features real stories of people with facial differences - people whose faces are disfigured as a result of cancer, trauma, or a birth defect. Unlike other disabilities, a facial difference not only affects how one is viewed by others but also how one views him or herself, since so much of our "immediate" identity is wrapped up in appearance. This book explores what it's like to try and live an ordinary life behind an extraordinary face. Although there are commonalities in every story, such as stares, and ridicule, each person faces unique challenges and realizes different outcomes. Each journey is an adventure and each person's story leaves the reader with nothing less than a sense of wonder. The stories in this book include viewpoints of not only the people affected by a facial difference, but also their family members. Peppered among these dramatic stories are chapters on medical and scientific advances, the history of facial plastic surgery, and face transplant..
Price: $7.96 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Appearance-related concerns and distress are experienced by a significant proportion of people with visible disfigurements, and are also reaching epidemic proportions in the general population. In the light of these developments, this book includes:

• A comprehensive summary and critical evaluation of research and understanding concerning the psychology of appearance
• A historical review of research to date
• A review of the methodological challenges for researchers in this area
• An overview of current understanding of appearance-related concerns and distress in the general population and among those with acquired or congenital disfigurements such as burns, clefts of the lip and/or palate, scarring and acne

Exploring the psychosocial factors which are protective and those which exacerbate distress, The Psychology of Appearance offers a vision of a comprehensive approach to support and intervention and addresses the following questions:

• Are attractive people at an advantage in life?
• What are the challenges presented by having a visibly different appearance?
• What are the psycho-social factors playing a part in individual differences in levels of adjustment and distress in relation to appearance?
• How can interventions meet the needs of those affected?

The Psychology of Appearance provides essential reading for psychology students, health and clinical psychologists, health professionals, employers and policy makers interested in the ramifications of appearance concerns..
Price: $31.41 [Notify me when price goes down.]