Disability Pride: Dispatches from a Post-ADA World

The Americans with Disabilities Act was passed more than 30 years ago—and a lot has happened in that time. Journalist Mattlin (In Sickness and in Health), who lives with spinal muscular atrophy, states that this book began as a personal mission to reconnect with the wider disability community and understand the ways it’s expanded and flourished in the years since the ADA. The resulting volume is both sobering and heartening. He touches on several topics that are painful (the continuing problem of enforced institutionalization) or controversial (the complex intersections of disability with assisted suicide). He also dedicates a large portion of the book to his observations of positives by highlighting the community’s activists and self-advocates: models, actors, and comedians, policymakers and politicians, and people simply living their everyday lives. He acknowledges that their visibility and accomplishments, by no means, indicate the situation has reached true equality. It’s a presentation that underscores one of the book’s central points: full acceptance of people with disabilities in all spaces is critical and required.