Next book

DON'T CALL ME INSPIRATIONAL

A DISABLED FEMINIST TALKS BACK

An inspirational affirmation of the unique worth of every individual.

A psychotherapist and leading advocate for women with disabilities chronicles her struggles to overcome prejudice and discrimination.

As someone with cerebral palsy, Rousso (Gender Matters: Training for Educators Working with Students with Disabilities, 2002, etc.) had to cope with physical limitations (controlling her motions, blurred speech, an ungainly appearance and contorted facial expressions) and the response of others to them. She describes her own shock at seeing her image in a mirror, and she forced herself to confront the reality of her “loopy, lopsided walk; those darting, dancing shoulders; those wandering, wiggly fingers; that goofy, gimpy smile.” The author credits her mother with nurturing her sense of independence and self-worth, despite her insistence that it was necessary to try to disguise her disabilities in order to make herself more acceptable to “the normalcy brigade.” Growing up in the 1950s, Rousso faced “[i]gnorance, fear, nastiness, and prejudice” against the disabled and the expectation that a woman's destiny was shaped by her ability to attract a husband. Her father told her that he would not have married someone with her disabilities. Nonetheless, Rousso credits her disability with giving her the freedom to pursue a career outside the home—where she also experienced prejudice. After receiving her master’s degree, she was expelled from the psychotherapeutic training institute where she was enrolled because the staff feared that her appearance would upset clients. Rousso writes that the feminist movement of the 1970s gave her the strength to free herself from internalizing such cultural stereotypes. She became a successful psychotherapist and mentor for disabled young women. Two decades later, the author formed an enduring love relationship. Now, writes Rousso, she is able to accept her body and sense its uncontrolled motions “as signs of life, not limits.”

An inspirational affirmation of the unique worth of every individual.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-4399-0937-9

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Temple Univ. Press

Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012

Next book

THE 48 LAWS OF POWER

If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.

Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.

If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-670-88146-5

Page Count: 430

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998

Next book

INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

Close Quickview