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:
“... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)