About this item
The first significant book on the history and impact of the ADA - the "eyes on the prize" moment for disability rights The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is the widest-ranging and most comprehensive piece of civil rights legislation ever passed in the United States, and it has become the model for disability-based laws around the world. Yet the surprising story behind how the bill came to be is little known.In this riveting account, acclaimed disability scholar Lennard J. Davis delivers the first behind-the-scenes and on-the-ground narrative of how a band of leftist Berkeley hippies managed to make an alliance with upper-crust, conservative Republicans to bring about a truly bipartisan bill. Based on extensive interviews with all the major players involved including legislators and activists, Davis recreates the dramatic tension of a story that is anything but a dry account of bills and speeches.
About the Author
Lennard J Davis is Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has written all types of work from memoirs to novels to popular journalism and been a commentator and interviewee on National Public Radio. Born in a family with two Deaf parents, Davis grew up in a Jewish working class, immigrant family in the Bronx. He attended the New York City public schools and then went to Columbia University where he was an undergraduate, graduate student, and then assistant professor. He has since taught at Brandeis University, University of Pennsylvania, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Binghamton University before arriving at his current post. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Westminster in London and Fordham University in New York. He runs, used to raise bees and chickens, and has an organic garden he tends in upstate NY.
