Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2020 -

Part critical reading and part disability-rights activism primer, HandiLand is poised to become the definitive study of representation of disability in contemporary literature for young readers. Wheeler (Univ. of Oregon) charts the correlation between changes in disability rights and related legislation to an increasing number of literary works for children and young adults that center on the experiences of persons with disabilities, which in turn generates a much-needed, broader public understanding of disability and the lived experience of disabled people in contemporary society. Interwoven with critical reflections on a number of children's and young adult titles (largely from the US, UK, and Ghana), the book reflects Wheeler's own personal and familial experiences with disability as well as the experiences of other disabled people when engaging with literature that represents them explicitly, implicitly, or metaphorically. Scholars and lay people whose personal or professional work intersects with the fields of literature, education, disability studies, and social justice should consider this title a must read.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

In this fascinating and important work, Tolliver (Univ. of Houston) argues that in the capitalist system racial discrimination is inextricably tied to economic exploitation. During the Cold War, American and Caribbean writers, authors, and entertainers who publicly maintained the connection became targets of government erasure and/or marginalization. Tolliver wonders "how the experience that the writers themselves considered essential could be rendered so insignificant" (p. 19). He demonstrates that radical thinkers of the African diaspora were vagabonds because their ideas threatened post-WW II reconstruction of the global order of racial capitalist production. Between 1947 and 1961, the cultural war for the hearts and minds of Americans and the international community was contingent on decoupling race from economic production. Artists and intellectuals who exhorted that the foundation of the capitalist order rested on inequality and racial injustice--Langston Hughes, Alice Childress, Paul Robeson, George Lamming, Jacques Stephen Alexis, et al.--were silenced. The vagabonds' fellow travelers were those who embraced Marxism but eschewed the communists, i.e., refused to operate within the ideological enclosures erected by the US and the Soviet Union. Tolliver's book complements Stephanie Li's Pan-African American Literature (CH, Mar'19, 56-2675), Tiffany Lethabo King's The Black Shoals (CH, Mar'20, 57-2306), and Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright, ed. by Glenda Carpio (CH, Oct'19, 57-0456).Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.