A fierce and fabulous revision to entrenched ableist scripts.
A disability advocate debuts with a collection offering potent rejoinders to ableism.
Tracing memories from childhood to the present, Taussig, who has a doctorate in disability studies, explores her life story and relationship with her body as well as attendant concerns of confidence, belief, and hope. Even though she grew up “after the passage of the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act,” the author, who was paralyzed at age 3 following a lengthy, deleterious cancer-treatment regimen, faced many difficult situations related to her disability, from confronting lowered expectations at a youth camp to navigating awkward moments with friends and acquaintances. She investigates what accessibility really means and how it relates to housing, employment, and health care—“The older I got,” she writes, “the more I cringed at the bills my body created”—and she looks at dating challenges and the difference between finding marriage and finding love, exposing many of the mechanics behind traditional social scripts. Constantly questioning the damaging illogic of nonaccessible public spaces, Taussig confronts the insidious nature of “stigma, isolation, erasure, misunderstanding, skepticism, and ubiquitous inaccessibility.” Introducing many key themes of disability studies throughout the narrative, the author pushes for nuanced awareness and understanding of fluid rather than fixed needs, essential for a more effective intersectional approach to social solutions. Taussig goes beyond empty inspirational jargon, forcing readers to consider the value of the real-world improvements that can emerge from centering underrepresented voices. An engaging, up-close view of the need for structural change regarding disabilities in this country, the text is a solid combination of theory and personal experience. “We should bring disabled perspectives to the center,” she writes, “because such perspectives create a world that is more imaginative, more flexible, more sustainable, more dynamic and vibrant for everyone who lives in a body.”
A fierce and fabulous revision to entrenched ableist scripts.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293679-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.
An insider’s chronicle of a pivotal presidential campaign.
Several months into the mounting political upheaval of Donald Trump’s second term and following a wave of bestselling political exposés, most notably Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin on Joe Biden’s health and late decision to step down, former Vice President Harris offers her own account of the consequential months surrounding Biden’s withdrawal and her swift campaign for the presidency. Structured as brief chapters with countdown headers from 107 days to Election Day, the book recounts the campaign’s daily rigors: vetting a running mate, navigating back-to-back rallies, preparing for the convention and the debate with Trump, and deflecting obstacles in the form of both Trump’s camp and Biden’s faltering team. Harris aims to set the record straight on issues that have remained hotly debated. While acknowledging Biden’s advancing decline, she also highlights his foreign-policy steadiness: “His years of experience in foreign policy clearly showed….He was always focused, always commander in chief in that room.” More blame is placed on his inner circle, especially Jill Biden, whom Harris faults for pushing him beyond his limits—“the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” Throughout, she highlights her own qualifications and dismisses suggestions that an open contest might have better served the party: “If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them.” Facing Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior, Harris never openly doubts her ability to confront him. Yet she doesn’t fully persuade the reader that she had the capacity to counter his dominance, suggesting instead that her defeat stemmed from a lack of time—a theme underscored by the urgency of the book’s title. If not entirely sanguine about the future, she maintains a clear-eyed view of the damage already done: “Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government…something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.”
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781668211656
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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