Essential reading for the disabled and nondisabled alike.
A powerful manifesto against ableist thinking.
Many nondisabled people think that disabled people just want to be “normal.” As this brief, outstanding text shows, that’s not only wrong, but cruel. Shew, a professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech, lost a leg to cancer at age 30 and suffered damaged hearing and “chemo brain” from the follow-up treatment. The first lie she heard was how wonderful new high-tech prosthetics were. In reality, the simplest, noncomputerized below-the-knee replacement costs $8,000 to $16,000, and all require a lifetime of return visits, adjustments, and replacements. Private insurance and Medicaid will cover some of the cost but never all, so the poor do without. Shew denounces the stereotypical story of a paraplegic “overcoming” a disability by moving around with the aid of new technology even as walking remains difficult. A wheelchair—“the universal icon of disability” that “requires the world to adjust to the disabled person”—is a much better way to get around. Although framed as a denunciation of technoableism, the belief that technical advances will “cure” disability, this book is a more inclusive, intensely squirm-inducing attack on the almost universal conviction that disabled people are broken and require fixing. The author makes a convincing case that their first priority is to get on with their lives and that their leading problem is not technical but social. “The world is set up to exclude disabled people,” writes Shew, and readers who insist they are an exception will crumble before her list of the disability clichés that saturate the media. There are the “pitiable freaks,” in which “disabled people are cast as either objects of curious medical interest or as objects of pity and charity”; the “shameful sinners,” a trope that “frames disability as a punishment or penance for some kind of sinful action”; and the “inspirational overcomers,” sometimes known as “inspiration porn” in the disability community.
Essential reading for the disabled and nondisabled alike.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781324036661
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
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