No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights.

• Author: Birenbaum, Steven J.

The notion of transforming Americans' feelings of pity toward the disabled into empathy is at the heart of No Pity, an overview of the disability rights movement. Shapiro, an associate editor for U.S. News and World Report, combines a fast-paced history of the movement and its key players, culminating in the passage of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, with a number of personal stories about people with disabilities. The combination sometimes is reminiscent of another superbly researched civil rights history, Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters.

Starting with a more diverse coalition than their 1960s predecessors in the black civil rights movement, disability rights activists have been successful by focusing on similar aims-changing the social consciousness of the nation, while simultaneously asserting political muscle in lobbying for equal rights under the law. There is little doubt in Shapiro's mind that the latter has been easier to achieve than the former.

Confrontation has played a large part in transforming both attitudes and laws. In Washington, members of American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT) illegally occupied the Capitol building and the Department of Transportation to protest physical barriers to use of the public transportation system by those with handicaps. Of course, these acts of civil disobedience were done while cameras rolled. The disability movement had absorbed lessons on how to gain wider support for their cause practiced by the earlier civil rights activists and the New Left.

Less visible confrontations also take place in No Pity. In one, a quadriplegic nursing home resident, Larry McAfee, petitioned Fulton County Superior Court to request the right to commit suicide. Warehoused after a motorcycle accident, McAfee was shunted from hospitals and nursing homes in Georgia, Alabama, and Ohio without considering his needs or wishes...