Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence.

• Author: Ervin, Mike

I approached John Hockenberry's Moving Violations with considerably more mixed emotions. Hockenberry has been in a wheelchair since a 1976 car accident. For more than a decade, he has been covering the news from Iowa to Somalia for National Public Radio and ABC News.

But Hockenberry has never been much of a presence in the disability community. It advances us to a degree that he appears on television so often without hiding behind bushes, doing tight head shots, or otherwise performing contortions like Franklin Roosevelt to avoid showing his wheelchair. But to his fellow gimps, he's not known as a guy who jumps at the chance to use his unique power to tell the amazing stories of the disability experience in a way that no one else can.

So I always wondered if on the inside he might be one of those dreadful types who "overcomes" his disability, who climbs mountains and wrestles alligators just to prove he's not really one of us. A lot of disabled writers and journalists, myself included, go through phases where we run from disability stories because we don't want to be pigeonholed. It's important to establish that we are multi-dimensional, but it's also important that we realize that our ability to capture the drama of life from our perspective is one of those dimensions. As we move beyond accepting and overcoming our life circumstance into embracing it, so do we embrace the good disability stories that come our way.

So I was quite pleasantly surprised to find a disability perspective in Moving Violations that was generally perceptive, progressive, inspiring, sensitive - and it even taught me a thing or two. Hockenberry is an outstanding writer with the talent to make these personal stories interesting to anyone. It is not by any means a book for crips only.

From the moment of his accident - caused when the driver of the car in which he had just hitched a ride dozed off - Hockenberry has had an astute take on life in a wheelchair. He even joked as he was pulled from the wreckage. It was more an adventure than a tragedy.

Until the accident, he recalls, "I understood the world only as an evolving landscape of clockwork challenges and gradual change. I would grow up. I would graduate. I would have a career. I would be happy. The upheavals of radical change and quantum unpredictability were taught to me as aberrations.... It's a gift to learn the fabric of unpredictability. We are taught to see the world as a big machine. On the fringe, chance...