"What this book attempts to capture and convey is simply the experience of being a person with a disability in America today. What does it feel like? The introduction says: "It is hard to unravel the tangled, knotted ball of the disability experience - isolation and differentness versus a common identity; images of weakness, vulnerability, enforced childishness, learned helplessness versus defiance, willingness to make waves and change the status quo; pity, destroying dignity, and its other side, fear, fear of our differentness, our 'imperfection,' as if perfection were humanly achievable, and then our own fear, raw fear of attitudes that would destroy our kind, whether by genocide, selective abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide of rationing of care. This book attempts to weave a rough but strong cloth from these gnarled strands, to give the feel of the disability experience."" "It's a cloth we all might have to put on at any time, particularly as we live longer. Here is an opportunity to learn, from those who know, how to wear it with style and pride."--BOOK JACKET.