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THURSDAY'S CHILD HAS FAR TO GO by Kathleen & Carol Panter Lukens

THURSDAY'S CHILD HAS FAR TO GO

By

Pub Date: Feb. 18th, 1969
Publisher: Prentice-Hall

Thursday's children--the physically disadvantaged--have much further to go and two women (Mrs. Panter grew up as a handicapped child; Mrs. Lukens is the parent of one) have told four separate stories in an alternating if otherwise undistinguished and indistinguishable fashion. One sometimes wonders whether ""Sit down, will ya"" and ""Gee thanks, you're a peach"" really overcomes the authors' presumed reluctance to write about disability in a straighter form. The four cases, two long, two short, deal with an aphasic child, a diabetic girl of thirteen (she tells her own story and her parents are impossibly unenlightened), a mongoloid and an infant whose skeletal system is as brittle as paper while the mother becomes equally fragile in spirits. The closing chapter, which gives a short and more substantive view of attitudes toward the handicapped (the real disability is often the non-acceptance of the family and its extension in the world) is more serviceable. It leads one to further question the adulterated approach--in this area, truth is stronger than fiction.