Born This Way: Learning to See Beyond "Difference" — A Review

Veronica Budano - Franco Angeli Edizioni, pp. 107
Born This Way: Learning to See Beyond "Difference" — A Review
(photo from Ombre e Luci archive, 2013)
Archival content: this article was published more than 10 years ago. The language and content reflect the sensitivities of the time.

Opening this book, I was immediately struck by its clarity. It's a short diary, well written, direct, and easy to follow. The author captures the questions, emotions, and fears that move parents when their child faces disability with real precision. She doesn't preach; instead, she suggests ways to weather those difficult moments—ways rooted in hope and the search for reasons to smile again. We count ourselves among those who believe in that approach.

Budano is the right person to write this book: a professional who supports people through crisis, and a mother of a child born with a limb malformation. That detail matters. It also gives me pause—because we know of far more complicated disabilities than the one described here, yet the author's son can still do countless other things. There's something worth acknowledging in that gap.

The author is honest, speaking from her own experience with a specific type of physical disability. So why recommend it? Because I genuinely hope this way of thinking reaches every family living through difficulty. You cannot rank suffering on a scale—some conditions are not "lighter" than others, and so I suggest this book to anyone willing to read it. Some of these insights really can unlock energy that matters in hard times.

Cristina Tersigni, 2013

Cristina Tersigni

Cristina Tersigni

Born in 1969, in 2003 Mariangela Bertolini asked Cristina to collaborate on the special issue about Faith and Light: Cristina was on the National Council of the association and was a useful liaison…

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