In writing Still Lives, Jonathan Cole wanted to find out about living in a wheelchair, without having what he calls "the doctor/patient thing" intervene. He has done this by asking people with spinal cord injuries the simple question of what it is like to live without sensation and movement in the body. If the body has absented itself, where does the person reside? He describes his method in the first chapter: "I have gone to people, not with a white coat or a stethoscope... but] to listen to their lives as they express them," and it is the candid and powerful narratives of twelve people...

A Washington Post Book World Rave

Harriet McBryde Johnson's witty and highly unconventional memoir opens with a lyrical meditation on death and ends with a bold and unsentimental sermon on pleasure. Born with a congenital neuromuscular disease, Johnson has never been able to walk, dress, or bathe without assistance. With assistance, she passionately celebrates her life's richness and pleasures and pursues a formidable career as an attorney and activist. Whether rolling on the streets of Havana, on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, or in an...

This book explains how space, place and mobility have shaped the experiences of disabled people both in the past and in contemporary societies. The key features of this insightful study include:
* a critical appraisal of theories of disability and a new disability model
* case studies to explore how the transition to capitalism disadvantaged disabled people
* an exploration of the Western city and the policies of community care and accessibility regulation.

Brendan Gleeson presents an important contribution to the major policy debates on disability in Western societies and...

This book explains how space, place and mobility have shaped the experiences of disabled people both in the past and in contemporary societies. The key features of this insightful study include:
* a critical appraisal of theories of disability and a new disability model
* case studies to explore how the transition to capitalism disadvantaged disabled people
* an exploration of the Western city and the policies of community care and accessibility regulation.

Brendan Gleeson presents an important contribution to the major policy debates on disability in Western societies and...

This innovative book discusses the meaning of 'inclusion' through the exploration of the interactions between disabled and non-disabled people at a community leisure centre. By exploring the nature of this interface, an understanding of how people create potential for both disability and inclusion is revealed. This book takes a very different approach to that of existing texts, which have tended to concentrate mainly on disabled people's exclusion. The advantage of this new approach is that it adds an extra dimension to our understanding of how discriminatory practice is variously...

I realized that I needed to learn about the legislative and legal aspects of disability as much as I did about our feelings regarding wholeness, beauty and ugliness, about the state called normalcy, about liberating technologies and therapies, about the role of the disabled in history and literature.

And what could better inform and enlighten me than contact with people who help create access, who elicit change via care, support, teaching, and study as their life's work?

As it turned out, I have learned from them that, in spite of the American...