A remarkable portrait of a woman who is proof that the disabled can live lives filled with purpose and pleasure.
Selected episodes from the life of “a tiny wheelchair woman with a certain amount of mouth,” as disability rights activist Johnson describes herself.
Johnson not only practices law in Charleston, S.C., specializing in disability issues, but she’s a force in the Democratic Party in Charleston and leads an annual protest against the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon, which, she argues, stereotypes people with disabilities as hopeless cases. The present memoir grew out of an article (“Unspeakable Conversations”) that ran in the New York Times Magazine in 2002 and is reprinted here. In it, Johnson describes her encounter with Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer, whose position that euthanasia should be legalized in the case of severely disabled newborns has aroused the ire of proponents of disability rights, among others. Johnson holds her own against Singer, as she does against the forceful photographer sent by the Times to take pictures of her for the article. Other chapters briskly and wittily recount her low-budget campaign for a seat representing Charleston on the county council in 1994 (she lost), her misadventures with the Secret Service as a delegate to the 1996 Democratic convention, her courtroom appearance as co-counsel for the plaintiff in a case under the Americans with Disabilities Act (she won), a visit to Cuba for a disability rights conference, which she covered for New Mobility magazine and a disastrous trip in 2001 to a disability convention in Tucson, where a fall from her wheelchair sent her to the emergency room and required an air-ambulance trip back home. The word “frail” scarcely describes Johnson’s physique, for she weighs only 70 pounds, has a spine so twisted by muscular dystrophy that it can’t support her and relies on others for the most basic aspects of daily care. But blunt, stubborn, proud, resourceful and smart are words that do describe her indeed.
A remarkable portrait of a woman who is proof that the disabled can live lives filled with purpose and pleasure.Pub Date: April 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-7594-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
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