Venus on Wheels: Two Decades of Dialogue on Disability, Biography, and Being Female in America
Libraries serving communities with active disability-rights movements and those where current anthropology circulates will want Frank's challenging but instructive "cultural biography" of Diane DeVries on their shelves. University of Southern California professor Frank is just two years older than DeVries; she's been writing about her since 1976, when Frank was a graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles and DeVries was a 26-year-old undergraduate there. DeVries is bright, funny, sexy--and has no arms or legs. Frank combines ethnography and life history to broaden her (and her readers') understanding of DeVries and DeVries' culture; she discusses the challenges of telling (without taking over) DeVries' narrative, and thus places her work in the context of current controversies within anthropology (as well as phenomenology and postmodernism). But what centersVenus on Wheelsis the story of Diane DeVries, a young woman who has made her own decisions ever since she determined as a child to reject the prostheses which her doctors recommended. A fascinating tale.Mary CarrollCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.