A basic resource for the disabled delivers advice on a range of topics.
This guide by disability expert Checkoway (Getting Paid: An Insider’s Guide to Filing Your Long-Term Disability Claim or Appeal, 2012, etc.) covers such subjects as equipment and technology (including emergency alert systems and wheelchairs), exercise, accessible housing, and travel. The first part, “Planning for Incapacity,” may be one of the more helpful sections, because it addresses both the psychological aspects of living with a disability and the practical impact, in particular, of working with one. The author’s seven strategies for coping with a disability are written with a keen sensitivity and from a personal perspective resulting from his own experience of being partially disabled. Similarly, the 10 tips Checkoway offers for the newly disabled, while somewhat more cautionary, set realistic expectations for one’s life ahead. Other parts of the book are not as inspirational but valuable nonetheless; there is good information, for instance, about the challenges of driving with a disability, elements that make housing accessible, and basic facts about monitoring systems, wheelchairs, wheelchair ramps, and stair lifts. Most of the chapters are short and easy to read, if sketchy at times; some of them have been adapted or reprinted from other sources. While many of the chapters seem somewhat cursory, the most comprehensive section of the book concerns traveling with a disability. Here, the author addresses such worthwhile topics as airlines, cruise ships, safety, health care, emergencies, travel insurance, and more. He adds a few useful insider tips as well, including important commentary about the decidedly unfriendly experience he had traveling as a disabled person on a European train. One of the better features of the volume may be its extensive appendices, which boast a wealth of resources for the disabled, including listings of manufacturers and distributors of monitoring services and equipment, state assistive technology programs, wheelchair manufacturers, and the like. A worthy starting point for those with disabilities who need an overview of the fundamentals; but readers will likely have to use the sources in the appendices to dig deeper for more information.
Pub Date: April 13, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 540
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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