Amy S. F. Lutz Bücher

In this collection of beautiful and raw essays, Amy S. F. Lutz writes openly about her experience―the positive and the negative―as a mother of a now twenty-one-year-old son with severe autism. Lutz's human emotion drives through each page and challenges commonly held ideas that define autism either as a disease or as neurodiversity. We Walk is inspired by her own questions: What is the place of intellectually and developmentally disabled people in society? What responsibilities do we, as citizens and human beings, have to one another? Who should decide for those who cannot decide for themselves? What is the meaning of religion to someone with no abstract language? Exploring these questions, We Walk directly―and humanly―examines social issues such as inclusion, religion, therapeutics, and friendship through the lens of severe autism. In a world where public perception of autism is largely shaped by the "quirky geniuses" featured on television shows like The Big Bang Theory and The Good Doctor , We Walk demands that we center our debates about this disorder on those who are most affected by its impacts.

In Chasing the Intact Mind, Amy Lutz traces the history of the "intact mind" concept, explaining how it influences current disability policy and practice in the United States. Lutz describes how we got to this moment, where the severely autistic are elided out of public discourse and the intensive, disability-specific supports they need defunded or closed altogether. Lutz argues that focusing on the intact mind and marginalizing those with severe disability reproduces historic patterns of discrimination that yoked human worth to intelligence, and that it is only by making space for the impaired mind that we will be able to resolve these ongoing clashes--as well as even larger questions of personhood, dependency, and care.