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
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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