Honest, lyrical, and for the early 1960s amazingly global in context, it remained the standard by which I later came to judge personal accounts of disability. Although Russell's book is long out of print, I turn back to it every few years and find it as fresh and important as I did over thirty years ago. As someone who lives by and with words, I keep looking for books by people with disabilities that measure up. Now, in the 1990s, with crip culture on the rise, I keep thinking I'll have no problem finding autobiographies and memoirs that, while using the personal as the narrative basis, go beyond the personal, as Russell did so many years ago, into the political and the global experience of disability. But they're still harder to find than they ought to be.
Any good writing is born out of personal experience.
As personal experiences go, disability in the American culture of the 1990s is ripe with possibilities. Others have been compelling and excellent accounts of living as a disabled person in America. They didn't go far enough. Following a career change necessitated by vision loss, I found myself as a college instructor teaching disability awareness classes to occupational therapy students. While the students were receptive to any of the books I used as texts, they were never able to see beyond the personal accounts of disability to the growing civil rights movement that would affect the books' authors.