Jerry's Kids. The Special Olympics. A blind person with a bundle of pencils in one hand and a tin cup in the
other. An old woman being helped across the street by a Boy Scout. The poster child, struggling bravely to walk.
The meager, embittered life of the "wheelchair-bound." For most Americans, these are the familiar, comfortable
images of the disabled: benign, helpless, even heroic, struggling against all odds and grateful for the kindness
of strangers. Yet no set of images could be more repellent to people with disabilities. In No Pity: People with
Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement, Joe Shapiro of U.S. News & World Report tells of a political
awakening few nondisabled Americans have even imagined. There are over 43 million disabled people in this country
alone; for decades most of them have been thought incapable of working, caring for themselves, or contributing
to society. But during the last twenty-five years, they, along with their parents and families, have begun to recognize
that paraplegia, retardation, deafness, blindness, AIDS, autism, or any of the hundreds of other chronic illnesses
and disabilities that differentiate them from the able-bodied are not tragic. The real tragedy is prejudice, our
society's and the medical establishment's refusal to recognize that the disabled person is entitled to every right
and privilege America can offer. No Pity's chronicle of disabled people's struggle for inclusion, from the
seventeenth-century deaf communities on Martha's Vineyard to the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act
of 1992, is only part of the story. Joe Shapiro's five years of in-depth reporting have uncovered many personal
stories as well.