Customer Reviews

Young Voices: Life with Diabetes

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This beautiful, photo-filled book provides much needed emotional support and wise guidance for the parents of newly diagnosed diabetic children. It would be a valuable to tool to the young people themselves and their extended families, teachers and friends. For everyone else, it is a very touching and inspiring collection of stories of some very heroic young people who live in different cultures all over the world. It just grabbed my heart.

The photographer has an extraordinary knack for catching the sparkle in the eyes of these brave children. The result is a work of art - a coffee table book about a serious topic. Hala Khalaf's interviewing skills respectfully open windows into the lives and minds of each young person: how they yearn for normalcy, how they learned of their diagnosis, how they find their own ways to cope, and how they bloom when they learn about other young people with diabetes.

Like the beautiful UNICEF/DK book, "Children Just Like Me", by Barnabus and Annabelle Kindersley, each vignette zooms into homes in places like western Siberia, Denmark, and Tanzania, revealing a dash of geography, a taste of the culture and cuisine, favorite pastimes and lots of rich imagery. Some would make good bedtime stories for little ones (and their parents) by helping them to know they are not alone and they will learn to thrive and have happy lives in partnership with their diabetes. The four students from Lewis and Clark College, in Portland Oregon, are inspirational role models as they describe their full, independent, generous lives and their bold aspirations for the future.

Our national thirst for contrived reality shows would be better served by reading some of these authentic stories, which do not shy away from the tough aspects of diabetes or the heart-wrenching heroism and hope.