History
In the late 1980s, Katz's son Seth (b. 1986) was diagnosed with autism. Katz equated the autism diagnosis with death, "You suffer the death of your expectations for your child." After overcoming her devastation and finding little written material on autism, Katz began speaking with others in the field and going to meetings. This gave her the details to write books about children, autism, and their vulnerability as a way to become more involved, more in control, and to make decisions for her son.
In 1992, Katz lived in West Hills, California and began collaborating on a book about autism with Dr. Edward Ritvo, a professor of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles. The book, entitled "Joey and Sam: A Heartwarming Storybook About Autism, a Family, and a Brother's Love" and published in 1993, was focused on explaining autism to 4- to 8-year-olds. Later that year, Katz founded Real Life Storybooks, a publisher of special needs storybooks for children.
Read more about this topic: Illana Katz
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)