New Books in Disability Studies

Andrea Louise Campbell is the author of Trapped in America’s Safety Net: One Family’s Struggle (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Campbell is professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Trapped in America’s Safety Net sheds light on the reality of means-tested programs in the United States. Following an accident that left her sister-in-law paralyzed, Campbell sees the vast array of federal and California state assistance programs up close. The book highlights the peculiar aspects of these programs, including the burden of asset tests that compel disabled Americans – and others receiving benefits – to liquidate assets and prevents them from saving for the future. The book is at once deeply personal, but also a great overview of how social policy actually works and often fails. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Wright‘s 2011 book Downs: The History of a Disability (Oxford University Press, 2011), offers readers a history that stretches far beyond the strictly defined genetic disorder that is its namesake. Wright shows us how the condition that came to be known as Down’s syndrome has as much to do with the social history of what was called ‘idiocy’ in Early Modern times and reform movements to integrate the disabled beginning in the 1960s as it does with the rise of asylums or the disputed discovery of “trisomie vingt-et-un.” Even the legacy of the condition’s name is a telling narrative about the modernization of medicine, from the use of the term ‘mongoloid’ to justify the (progressive for the time) anthropological theory of racial reversion to debates over whether to rename the disease in honor of John Langdon Down or place it within a more rigid taxonomy of congenital mental disorders. On their own, all of these stories are compelling windows into different dimensions of medicine, and as a whole they comprise a book that shows readers just how contested the process of ‘medicalizing’ a condition has always been.The book’s chapters progress both chronologically and thematically. We begin with the legal definition of idiocy in the English Common Law as a way for the state to regulate the inheritance of property, and a glance at different contemporary philosophical understandings of mental handicap. Then, Wright discusses John Langdon Down’s work at the Earlswood Asylum and the influence of both education reforms and genetic studies on the definition of mental handicap. Proceeding through Jérôme Lejeune’s disputed discovery of trisomy 21 and the role of genetic screening in abortion debates, the book concludes by discussing how social movements in the late twentieth century have profoundly affected the ethical and political dimensions of Down’s syndrome. Winner of the British Society for the History of Science’s 2013 Dingle Prize, awarded biennially to a book exemplifying critical focus and a novel perspective while remaining accessible to the public, Downs is a great read for specialists and non-specialists alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dale Maharidge‘s Bringing Mulligan Home: The Other Side of the Good War (PublicAffairs, 2013) is something of a departure from our regular offerings. Normally our authors are established academics specializing in the field of military history. Dale Maharidge, however, is an award-winning journalist who, prior to Bringing Mulligan Home, has had only limited exposure to the subject of the Pacific Theater in World War II. What he does bring however is a personal stake in the topic – his father Steve Maharidge served in the Sixth Marine Division, and took part in the assaults on Guam and Okinawa. As a child and then as a young man, Dale was both enthralled and frightened by his father’s regular accounts of the war – enthralled as a son learning more about his father’s experiences in combat; frightened by the storm of emotions and anger that often accompanied his stories. Inspired to learn more about his father’s service, Dale came to understand how Post-Traumatic Stress and Traumatic Brain Injury shaped his father’s post-war life, as well as that of the dozen other Marines he interviewed who served alongside him.Though written in a journalistic style, Dale Maharidge reserves the bulk of the text for the personal testimony of his twelve interview subjects. The account they weave spares no word or emotion as it offers a harsh testimony of the power and violence of the Pacific War. The collected narratives present a visceral account of combat that rivals Eugene Sledge’s classic With the Old Breed, while also bearing witness to John Dower’s conclusions in his groundbreaking monograph, War Without Mercy. While the book does occasionally lag, caught up in inconsistencies and missed conclusions, in the larger perspective these flaws are minor. Bringing Mulligan Home captures the ugly, nightmarish side of the Pacific War, but never at the expense of the humanity of his father, or his compatriots (well, there is one exception – but more on that in the interview). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Every once in a while Nature gives us insight into the human condition by providing us with a unique case whose special properties illumine the species as a whole. Christopher is such an example.”Christopher has a startling talent for language learning, thrown into sharper relief by his concurrent disabilities. Autistic, apraxic, visuo-spatially impaired, and with a severely low non-verbal IQ, he has been feeding his linguistic fascination by collecting languages and has now mastered more than twenty. Neil Smith and his colleagues have been working with Christopher for over twenty years, and The Signs of a Savant: Language Against the Odds (Cambridge University Press, 2011) is their second to detail their work and Christopher’s progress, following on from The Mind of a Savant, published in 1995.The book documents Christopher’s experiences of learning British Sign Language. Like other languages, BSL has a full grammatical system on which its vocabulary hangs, but unlike spoken languages, it relies on physical coordination, and the integration of handshapes, arm movements, body postures and facial expressions, all of which pose problems for Christopher.The results of Christopher’s BSL lessons are analyzed in detail, and the book culminates in a new insights into the nature of the mind and where language fits within the complex system of human cognition.I talk with Neil Smith about savantism, about sign language and about the mind. He also tells me about his first (accidental) steps in linguistics, how they took him to Africa and back to London, and how he is the only author not only to have published a case study on his own son’s acquisition of languages, but also his grandson’s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You may not know who John Galsworthy is, but you probably know his work. Who hasn’t seen some production of The Forsyte Saga? Galsworthy was one of the most popular and famous British writers of the early 20th century (the Edwardian Era). He left an enormous body of work, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932. But Galsworthy was also what we might call a “public humanitarian,” that is, he used his high profile and influence in a great, good cause. The focus of his effort was disabled solders returning from World War I. We, of course, are well acquainted with the remarkable destructive power of modern weaponry. Not a week goes by (alas) in which we do not hear about a soldier being wounded by mines, grenades, artillery fire or bombs (often of the “roadside” variety). But we also have come to expect that soldier, no matter how grievously wounded, will receive medical treatment that will stand at least a fighting chance of saving their lives. And indeed, many wounded soldiers do survive incredibly severe injuries and return to our world. The generation that fought and suffered World War I–or as they called it “The Great War”–were really not familiar with any of this. Europeans and Americans of the nineteenth century were surely used to wars, but they were generally short and decided by pivotal battles (Waterloo, Gettysburg, Sedan). But the Great War was different. Millions of men lived for years at the “front” and under the shells. Many died there and many more were wounded. Thanks to advances in medical knowledge (and particularly the discovery of the germ theory of disease), a goodly proportion of the wounded survived. This presented a new problem: How to re-integrate wounded men into society? This became Galsworthy’s cause. The course of his efforts on the part of wounded soldiers is detailed with great skill and care by Jeffrey Reznick in his John Galsworthy and the Disabled Soldiers of the Great War (Manchester UP, 2009). Reznick shows us Galsworthy attempting to create the modern infrastructure of veterans’ care: special hospitals, rehabilitation programs, work-transition agencies and so on. And we get to read Galsworthy’s writing on the subject, both non-fiction and fiction. All this give us–or gave me–a new understanding of Galsworthy’s literary work. Galsworthy was a great man. But as it turned out he was greater than I knew. We should thank Jeff for bringing his good-works to our attention.Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices