A Boy Beyond Reach

by Cheri Florance (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $3.31

  As a scientist and therapist, Dr Cheri Florance had the skills and training to help her patients to overcome speech and hearing difficulties. But nothing could prepare her for her toughest challenge -- her own son Whitney. From birth, he appeared unable to hear, seemed incapable of making any sounds, and was indifferent to those around him. Although the diagnosis of autism seemed to fit, Cheri could not accept the life that such a condition predicted for Whitney. The authorities begged her to institutionalize him and in defying them she jeopardized relationships and her professional reputation. But she saw something in Whitney that no one else did -- a boy who was trapped by his inability to communicate. In Cheri Florance's intense search for answers, she not only found her son but discovered something profound about the way the brain works and how we learn. This is a story that will resonate with any parent who has struggled to help a child.

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $3.31

  The third child of Dr Florance, a renowned brain doctor and communication difficulties expert, was a deaf mute, insensitive to pain and indifferent to other people. Whitney's paediatrician diagnosed him as having the severest form of autism. But Dr Florance saw a glimmer of brilliance in Whitney and insisted that if she could only communicate with him he would start to learn. For the next decade, Dr Florance struggled with her many roles - mother of a handicapped child, rational scientist, mother of two healthy children, unhappy wife, outcast scientist and overstressed single mother - in her battle to rescue her son, as her career, marriage and reputation fell to pieces. There were crises; on one occasion she woke to find Whitney pressing a knife to his brother's arm, and on another she was told that if she didn't institutionalize Whitney, the courts would take him away. But, little by little, Dr Florance begins to break through. When Whitney is five, she hears him laugh out loud at a Disney film and realises for the first time that his vocal chords work and when he's six a voice she doesn't recognise shouts out 'Dr Florance'.