Summary:

Eric Calhoune is known to his classmates as "Moby" because of the extra weight he has carried since grade school.  Though his mother is young and athletic, he has inherited the body type of the father he's never known.  Now, in high school, the fat is turning to muscle under the discipline of hard swim team workouts.  But that transformation has been slow in coming, since for some time Eric has taken on a private commitment to "stay fat for Sarah Byrnes."  Sarah, whose name is a painful pun, was severely burned as a small child not, as we are given to believe early on, because of an accident, but because of a cruel and crazy father who stuck her face and hands into a woodstove in a moment of rage.  She has lived with him and his threats for some time; that and her disfiguring scars have made her tough, smart, and self-protective.  Eric and she became friends as social outcasts.  Well-matched intellectually and in their subversive wit, they write an underground newspaper together.  Sarah, however, lands suddenly in the hospital, speaking to no one, making eye contact with no one.  Eric faithfully visits her and, per nurses' instructions, keeps up a running one-sided conversation as if she could hear him.  As it turns out, she can.  She is faking catatonia because the hospital is a safe place, and she has chosen this as an escape route from her father.  Eric and a sympathetic coach/teacher go to great lengths to find Sarah's mother-who, it turns out, can't bring herself to be involved in her daughter's life because of her own overwhelming shame.  Ultimately the father is apprehended, and Sarah, nearly eighteen, is taken into the coach's home and adopted for what remains of the childhood she bypassed long before.  In the course of this main plot, other kids enter the story and in various ways come to terms with serious issues in their own lives, some of which are aired in a "Contemporary American Thought" course where no controversy is taboo.

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This documentary film follows the professional and private lives of the 2004 U.S. Wheelchair Rugby team. Murderball is a highly engaging, informative look at the lives of a group of quadriplegic men who are also elite athletes. The sport of "murderball" combines basketball, hockey, and rugby. It is played in custom-built wheelchairs with angled, shield-like metal side plates that make the chairs look like chariots, encouraging the term "gladiators" that is often applied to the players. Invented in Canada in the 1970s, murderball was renamed "wheelchair rugby" or "quad rugby" to make it less offensive to corporate sponsors, but retains its toughness with any name. The sport is played without helmets, and its players tackle each other through chair-to-chair collisions as they try to move the ball to the end zones.

The documentary begins with the 2002 World Wheelchair Rugby Championships in Sweden, includes team tryouts and competitions with arch-rival Canada, and closes with the Paralympic Games (held two weeks after the traditional Olympic Games end) in Athens, Greece. The film is a fast-paced sports documentary with abundant chair-level footage of action on the court, but also focuses on many aspects of the personal lives of key players, including psychological conflicts and sexuality. While the documentary is focused on the entire team, not individuals, three distinct subplots include the emotional journey of team captain Mark Zupan, including his relationship with the friend whose actions precipitated Zupan's disabling accident over ten years earlier; the passion and resentment of the Canadian team coach Joe Soares, who was cut from the U.S. Team and whose obsession with murderball leaves little space for Soares to appreciate his musically gifted teenage son until his own heart attack; and the experiences of newly disabled athlete Keith Cavill.

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This is an anthology of poetry by poets who have disabilities. The book's sections are ordered more or less chronologically, although the editors have identified other groupings as well: "The Disability Poetics Movement," "Lyricism of the Body," and "Towards a New Language of Embodiment." Also included is a well organized preface by editor Jennifer Bartlett and an informative "Short History of American Disability Poetry" by editor Michael Northen. An essay by or about each poet prefaces that poet's work. The book makes no pretense at being comprehensive but offers a large selection of poets with a variety of physical impairments (e.g. cerebral palsy, rheumatoid arthritis, dystonia, blindness, deafness, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, stroke). It presents important figures who have contributed to current thinking about the disabled body and social and physical constraints imposed on it, as well as poets who do not/did not identify themselves as disabled in their work.

The first section, "Early Voices" presents poets no longer alive who wrote in the mid to late 20th century and rarely forefronted their disability (Larry Eigner, Vassar Miller, Robert Fagan, Josephine Miles-- and  Tom Andrews, who DID write about his hemophilia). Their work took place mostly during a time when disability was stigmatized and kept hidden. Michael Davidson's essay on Larry Eigner's work is particularly informative, showing how the poet's severe cerebral palsy, which kept him housebound, pervaded his work although he made no overt reference to his condition.

"The Disability Poetics Movement" highlights poets ("crip poets") who openly celebrate their unusual bodies. These are poets who emerged shortly after passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1992. Some, such as Jim Ferris, Kenny Fries, Petra Kuppers became disability rights advocates and educators in the field of disability studies. Editor Michael Northen speculates that Fries "may be the single most powerful representative of this group" because he rejects both the medical and social models of disability and is "asking instead for a redefinition of beauty and of the way that disability is perceived" (20-21). Other poets in this section are Daniel Simpson, Laura Hershey, Jillian Weise, Kathi Wolfe, and John Lee Clark.

Ten poets contribute to the section, "Lyricism of the Body," most of them unknown to me (Alex Lemon, Laurie Clements Lambeth, Brian Teare, Ona Gritz, Stephen Kuusisto, Sheila Black, Raymond Luczak, Anne Kaier, Hal Sirowitz, Lisa Gill). Their prefatory essays are particularly helpful in providing context for their work. The final section, "Towards a New Language of Embodiment," is more experimental than the rest of the collection. "Rather than explaining an individual story, bodily condition is manifested through the form" (17). Poets are Norma Cole, C. S. Giscombe, Amber DiPietra, Ellen McGrath Smith, Denise Leto, Jennifer Bartlett, Cynthia Hogue, Danielle Pafunda, Rusty Morrison, David Wolach, Kars Dorris, Gretchen E. Henderson, Bernadette Mayer.

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As the film opens, Gianni (Kim Rossi Stuart) prepares to meet for the first time the child he fathered 15 years earlier. The boy, Paolo (Andrea Rossi), was born with cerebral palsy and is of below average intelligence as well as being physically handicapped. Paolo's 19-year-old mother died when he was born, and Gianni could not bear to see the baby, or to have any subsequent contact with him. Paolo has been raised by his uncle, the dead woman's brother. Now Gianni, who lives in Milan with his wife and baby, prepares to take Paolo to a rehabilitation facility in Germany.

Paolo is trusting and does not question Gianni's long absence from his life. He manages to walk with the help of a cane, and tries to function as independently as he is physically capable of. When Gianni tries to feed him with a fork, Paolo responds by feeding Gianni instead. Many such small gestures that Paolo makes towards Gianni loosen Gianni's reserve, and each begins to respond to the other with affection.

In Germany, neither Gianni nor Paolo understand the language--in this they are equally disadvantaged. Gianni meets Nicole (Charlotte Rampling), mother to a teenage girl whose palsied speech impairment makes her unintelligible to anyone except Nicole. From the way that Gianni interacts with Paolo, Nicole senses that Gianni is Paolo's father, although Gianni at first denies it, claiming he is a friend of the family. When Gianni finally is truthful with Nicole, and worries about how Paolo will survive as an adult, she warns him that suffering is inevitable for the parent of an impaired child.

Gianni is horrified by the intensive physical therapy regimen to which Paolo is subjected in the German rehab facility, and removes the boy from therapy. He decides to bring Paolo home with him, but as they are driving back to Italy, Paolo "acts out" and Gianni realizes to his great sorrow that Paolo wishes to return to his uncle and live as he has for the first 15 years of his life. He has the keys to the house he grew up in and doesn't want to give them up.

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Summary:

The author takes us on a highly colorful autobiographical tour of his medical career - his personal life never enters this account - from a classical medical education in Paris as a young expatriate Swede (he remains expatriate the entire book) to his internal medicine practice in France, including a tour of Naples as a volunteer during the cholera epidemic of 1881 and his finally settling in Italy. There are also anecdotes - many of them side-splitting and told with uncommon skill - about conducting a corpse back to Sweden, a truly thrilling journey to Lapland,  encounters with the legendary Charcot, his return to San Michele whence the book begins with a mythopoetic retelling of his first visit there, and his last years at San Michele as patron of a community (both local and international) and as collector and explorer of the nearby Mediterranean.        

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On July 5, 1998, physics Professor Alan Cromer suffered a heart attack on a plane, and survived after almost an hour of resuscitation efforts, but sustained brain injury from lack of oxygen.  In this chronicle of caregiving, his wife, a psychiatric nurse by training, gives a very personal, detailed account of the radical adaptations his disability required of both of them.  Her story includes reflection on his and her own emotional adjustments to loss of parity in communication and awareness, practical adjustments to physical limitations, and social adjustments to family, friends and professional colleagues.

Arduously, over time, Alan regained some ability to read and speak--indeed, he spoke to groups with Janet about their life together during the peak of his rehabilitation.  But the road to even partial recovery was bumpy, and the writer fully acknowledges the pain, grief, irritation, and deep frustrations that intersected moments of authentic pleasure, discovery, and mutual kindness.  Professor Cromer died September 3, 2005.

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Summary:

Perillo's essays offer a lively, variegated view from the wheelchair of a woman with multiple sclerosis who is also a naturalist, an outdoorswoman, a wife, and an award-winning writer.  Not all of them focus on her condition, though observations about living with the disease occur in most, and are thematic to some.  Most are also laced with wry humor.  One comes to see in these sketches from the Pacific Northwest how full and rich a life it is possible to live while also fully acknowledging and even lamenting the loss of mobility.  She invokes Thoreau several times, and her work may be easily situated in his tradition of personal, reflective essays on the natural world.  For her, the natural world extends to the world of the body, linked as it is with the bodies of all living things.

            

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The narrator of this novel, fifteen-year-old Christopher Boone, is autistic (or, more accurately, probably, has Asperger's Syndrome). He lives with his father and believes his mother died two years before. Christopher is extremely good at mathematics, seems to have a photographic memory, but does not like novels (other than detective stories, which are about observation and logic), because he cannot empathize with human emotions or make sense of the indirect or figurative. For Christopher, metaphors, like fictions, are lies. He is very fond of dogs, and hates to be touched by people.

When a neighbour's dog is killed, he decides to investigate and, with the encouragement of his teacher, to write a book about his investigation. He quickly makes some very disturbing discoveries. He learns that his mother is not dead after all, but living in London with the husband of the dead dog's owner. The fact that his father has lied to him devastates Christopher. He runs away to London to find his mother, and his courage and tenacity allow him to solve not only the mystery of the dog's death but that of his family's past and future.

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Extraordinary Measures, based on events in the life of John Crowley and his family, dramatizes the father's quest to find a cure for Pompe disease, a relatively rare genetic condition that afflicts two of his three children.  The quest brings into play three powerful, often competing human motives:  a father's love for his children, a scientist's pursuit of knowledge and recognition, and a corporation's mandate for profits.  Crowley (Brendan Fraser), an energetic marketing executive, and his wife Aileen (Keri Russell) are told that their children Megan (Meredith Droeger), age eight, and Patrick (Diego Velazquez), age six, have reached the upper limits of their life expectancies.

When Megan, an affectionate, playful, and clear-sighted child, is rushed to the hospital with symptomatic heart and respiratory failure, a young physician empathically encourages the parents to think of their only daughter's immanent death as a "blessing" that will end her suffering.  However, Megan survives.  "So I guess you could say we dodged that blessing," Crowley echoes back to the doctor.  Seeing Megan's will to live reinforces John's wish to make her well, and he abruptly abandons his promising career to find a medical researcher who can reverse Pompe's effects. 

Immersing himself in medical journals and websites, John discovers the intriguing research of Robert Stonehill (Harrison Ford).  A cranky, renegade scientist who thinks to the beat of rock music blasting from a boom box, Stonehill has developed a cutting-edge theory about correcting the enzyme deficiency in the cells of people with Pompe, which gradually weakens skeletal, respiratory, and heart muscles.  However, to produce a treatment derived from his theory, he needs more funding.  John immediately creates a fund to support Pompe research, and he and Stonehill form a mutually exasperating partnership.  They lock horns with each other, venture capitalists, and finally a large genomic research corporation, Zymagen.

Despite the scientist's abrasive ways, Zymagen gives Stonehill a lab and creates employment for Crowley.  However, the two confront the company's culture of rigorous competition among its scientists and its focus on profit margins that ignore the fates of individual children.  When the Zymagen scientists develop a promising therapy, they decide to offer the treatment only to infants, who are most likely to experience benefits.  Disqualifying Crowley's children from the promising trials, this decision, combined with Crowley's obvious conflict of interest, creates the film's final obstacle.  Stonehill and the executives uncharacteristically collaborate to overcome it. 

This ending might seem implausibly neat, but it's consistent with the film's mostly evenhanded approach to the dilemmas of pursuing treatments for orphan diseases.  Toward the end, we witness even Crowley, albeit uncomfortably, reaching beyond his fatherly motives for the Pompe project and turning his argument for bringing the treatment to market from children to profits.  The longer the patients live, John assures the executives, the more treatments Zymagen will sell.  The film leaves space for viewers to ask to what extent Crowley's argument creates a fair compromise or opens an ethical quandary.  In a closing narration, the film moves beyond the fictionalized characters and plot to the real Crowley children and a tempered victory.  Yes, the Pompe treatment stopped the progression of the disease and improved Megan's and Patrick's hearts.  But it has not cured the Crowley children, and almost certainly it won't.   The treatments do, however, show more success when taken at the onset of symptoms.      

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Summary:

McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) escapes work on a prison farm by feigning mental illness, but he finds himself in a far more coercive institution than the one he left behind. The other men, both sane and insane, are just like him: they hide in the locked ward from the law, their families, or the despair of their own lives.

McMurphy animates the dull monotony with fractious games, pranks, and excursions, but he encounters stiff opposition from the head nurse, Mildred Ratched (Louise Fletcher), whose system provides her with pills and electroshock to maintain control. When the nurse discovers that McMurphy has smuggled two women into the ward, she threatens to tell the mother of young Billy (Brad Dourif). Billy commits suicide and an enraged McMurphy tries to strangle Ratched. McMurphy is lobotomized and returned to the ward only to be smothered by his friend Bromden, who then escapes.

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