Freeing Teresa is an extraordinary story about Franke and her sister Teresa and their wider family.
Teresa has Down’s Syndrome but lived independently until her father died when the family had her declared incompetent and confined to residential care, from where she was rescued by Franke. The growing tensions in the family leading to a dramatic rescue make for a riveting read. A decade later, Teresa still lives independently and has won a Human Rights Award.
Freeing Teresa shows that people are not powerless against groups or systems. Franke shows the need to document everything, tread carefully, assemble a team. This book's message will inspire you with its heart, empathy, and never-give-up spirit.
Freeing Teresa is a true story about an activist who tries to stop her powerful siblings from putting their disabled sister into a nursing home. She fails. And then must rescue her sister.
Franke James immediately objected when she heard her siblings’ plan to put their youngest sister, Teresa Heartchild, into a nursing home. “What about Teresa’s human rights?” But Franke was told that Teresa, who has Down syndrome, had lost her right to decide. She had been declared “not capable” by a social worker. The other siblings, now acting as Teresa’s “guardians,” insisted they had all the decision-making power,…
Wonder Drug covers the startling untold story of Thalidomide, a sleeping pill, in the USA.
The standard story is that the tenacity of two women Frances Kelsey and Helen Taussig supposedly kept this drug that caused horrific birth defects off the market. The facts are that drug company machinations and FDA incompetence meant thousands of pregnant women had this drug and hundreds of babies were deformed and disappeared.
Kelsey and Taussig had a token triumph, but the company escaped blame, FDA bureaucracy increased dramatically in size, and the bureaucrats seem as tightly enmeshed with companies now as they were in 1960-1962.
It is difficult to know whether we learnt anything from Thalidomide, other than the amazing spirit the children affected have since displayed.
Longlisted for the Andrew 2024 Carnegie Medal for Non-Fiction
The shocking, never-before-told story of America's thalidomide victims
In Germany on Christmas Day 1956 a baby girl was born without ears. She was the first victim of the notorious thalidomide epidemic. There would be over 10,000 more across 46 countries.
For years the world believed the United States had avoided the catastrophe. After Frances Kelsey at the Food and Drug Administration became suspicious of the dangers of thalidomide in 1960, she led a successful fight to block its commercial approval.
But now, having probed government and corporate archives and interviewed hundreds…
We increasingly live in a virtual world of models – pandemic models, climate change models, economic models. These have taken on what seems like a greater reality than the world of people and places we know and what used to be called common sense.
At one level everyone feels this. Modeling is Thompson’s job. This leaves her ideally placed to grapple with the question of just how real these models are and what weight we should put on these alternate realities and what weight on a reality we grew up in, which feels like its disappearing.
Thompson tackles these complex topics in a down-to-earth way. The title Escape from Model Land tells you she’s on our side rather than the side of the experts.
Shortlisted for Best Maths Book of 2022 by Chaulkdust Magazine
'A brilliant account of how models are so often abused and of how they should be used' John Kay
How do mathematical models shape our world - and how can we harness their power for good?
Models are at the centre of everything we do. Whether we use them or are simply affected by them, they act as metaphors that help us better understand the increasingly complex problems facing us in the modern world. Without models, we couldn't begin to tackle three of the major challenges facing modern society: regulation…
Shipwreck of the Singular is about a pharmaceuticalization crisis that parallels the 2007 financial crisis, when money chased money as poverty rose. Now drugs chase drugs as life expectancy and reproductive replacement rates fall. This crisis stems from target based developments in health that parallel the monetary targets that drive neoliberalism. We need to restore an ability to produce both health and financial products that help people live the life they want to live rather than products that suck them into living lives corporations want them to live. Making the politics personal and looking at what is happening through a health rather than an economic lens may help shed light on how to achieve this.
