Home Bound: Growing Up with a Disability in America, by Cass Irvin (Temple University Press, 2004)

After becoming paralyzed by polio at the age of nine, Cass Irvin made many visits to the famous Warm Springs rehabilitation facility founded by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Irvin feels connected to Roosevelt and admires him for his vast accomplishments. But she also resents him for his success in "passing" as a non-disabled person. Throughout her life, Irvin has inhabited a similar duality, struggling to reconcile her desire to succeed by mainstream standards with her focus on increased access and support for people with disabilities. In her memoir, Home Bound: Growing Up with a Disability in America, Irvin chronicles her long and deeply personal journey to self-actualization as an independent woman and disability rights activist. Through well-written and memorable anecdotes about everything from interviewing personal assistants to negotiating public transportation, Irvin gives readers a rare window into the daily struggles of people with disabilities. Throughout the text, Irvin maintains a candid, matter-of-fact tone even when sharing heartbreaking stories of confining herself to her bedroom for a month to make things easier on her alcoholic mother and being denied college assistance because of a counselor's low expectations. Irvin is brutally honest about her initial hesitancy to join the disability movement. She takes the reader through her own paradigm shift from believing that the onus was on her to avoid being a burden to demanding social change. This candor is the strongest aspect of Home Bound: Irvin refuses pity and instead inspires empathy and solidarity. For the reader, the end result is a heightened awareness of and a desire to dismantle "the gimp mystique," society's belief that people with disabilities have less value than others. $15.95 paper (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA 19122; www.temple.edu/tempress)
Reviewed by Kelly Harris Perin

The Two-Body Problem: Dual-Career-Couple Hiring Practices in Higher Education, by Lisa Wolf-Wendel, Susan B. Twombly, and Suzanne Rice (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003)

For many, dual-career-couple hiring in academia means finding a tenure-track position for the spouse of an academic "star," whether or not the "trailing" spouse is qualified. While the practice of finding or creating tenure-track positions for accompanying spouses and partners draws considerable ire from critics of dual-career hiring, the authors of The Two-Body Problem find that it is also the rarest form of dual-career accommodation. Their survey of AAC&U member institutions shows that far more common types of assistance are providing contacts outside the institution for non-academic spouses or partners, providing internal contacts, and sending a resume or vita to relevant employers or departments. Authors Lisa Wolf-Wendel, Susan B. Twombly, and Suzanne Rice admit that they were unabashed supporters of dual-career hiring at the start of their investigation. However, they have come to view such practices with more ambivalence over the course of their survey and case study research project. As a result, they consider both the positive and negative aspects of dual-career accommodations and examine how such policies do or do not serve the interests of the institution as a whole as well as individual faculty members. They open their study with an overview, drawn primarily from survey data, of dual-career accommodation policies. Here, the authors compare institutions with and without such policies, report institutions' reasons for creating policies, identify barriers to dual-career policies, and describe common types of accommodation. The authors devote one chapter to each of five types of assistance for dual-career couples: relocation services, temporary faculty positions, shared faculty positions, joint advertisements with nearby institutions, and tenure-track positions. The concluding chapters review common concerns surrounding dual-career assistance, such as fairness, legality, and faculty autonomy in the hiring process, and offer recommendations for implementing or improving assistance programs and policies. As the first comprehensive national study to systematically examine institutional dual-career policies and practices, The Two-Body Problem will interest administrators and faculty looking for ways to balance the needs of institutions with those of increasingly numerous dual-career couples. $42.00 hardcover (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2715 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218-4363; www.press.jhu.edu/)
Reviewed by Karen Rowan