Trevon Jenifer

Jenifer finished third in his weight class in Maryland's state high-school wrestling tournament. It's a nice accomplishment, but it wouldn't merit a book except that he was born with no legs to a poor family in a high-crime area of Prince George's County. He walked on his hands and had to avoid both glass and the residue from irresponsible pet owners. Eventually, his mother and stepfather moved to a more rural area and enrolled him in a new virtually all-white school in Huntington. It was there he decided to wrestle. His larger struggle hasn't been athletics but--as with all physically challenged youngsters--to fit in. Wrestling helped, but so did his involvement with student government. Jenifer seems almost as proud of his efforts on the homecoming committee as he does his wrestling successes. He's a down-to-earth young man with aspirations to become involved in the criminal-justice system, and he gratefully acknowledges all those who helped him along the way and seems ready to see what he can accomplish as an adult. It's an inspirational story related humbly and evenhandedly. --Wes Lukowsky Copyright 2006 Booklist.

Mixing rigorous social theory with concrete analysis, Reading and Writing Disability Differently unpacks the marginality of disabled people by addressing how the meaning of our bodily existence is configured in everyday literate society. Tanya Titchkosky begins by illustrating how news media and policy texts reveal dominant Western ways of constituting the meaning of people, and the meaning of problems, as they relate to our understandings of the embodied self. Her goal is to configure disability as something more than a problem, and beyond simply a positive or a negative, and to treat texts on disability as potential sites to examine neo-liberal culture. Titchkosky holds that through an exploration of the potential behind limited representations of disability, we can relate to disability as a meaningful form of resistance to the restricted normative order of contemporary embodiment. Incorporating a textual analysis of ordinary depictions of disability, this innovative study promises to represent embodied differences in new ways and alter our imaginative relations to the politics of the body.