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:
“The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!
There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.”
—Edmond De Goncourt (1822–1896)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)