An influential disability-rights activist recounts her lifelong battles for education, employment and societal inclusion, in a personal account that includes coverage of her role in advising the Carter administration to help create the Americans with Disabilities Act. (biography & autobiography). - (Baker & Taylor)

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year for Nonfiction

"...an essential and engaging look at recent disability history."— Buzzfeed

One of the most influential disability rights activists in US history tells her personal story of fighting for the right to receive an education, have a job, and just be human.

A story of fighting to belong in a world that wasn’t built for all of us and of one woman’s activism—from the streets of Brooklyn and San Francisco to inside the halls of Washington—Being Heumann recounts Judy Heumann’s lifelong battle to achieve respect, acceptance, and inclusion in society.

Paralyzed from polio at eighteen months, Judy’s struggle for equality began early in life. From fighting to attend grade school after being described as a “fire hazard” to later winning a lawsuit against the New York City school system for denying her a teacher’s license because of her paralysis, Judy’s actions set a precedent that fundamentally improved rights for disabled people.

As a young woman, Judy rolled her wheelchair through the doors of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in San Francisco as a leader of the Section 504 Sit-In, the longest takeover of a governmental building in US history. Working with a community of over 150 disabled activists and allies, Judy successfully pressured the Carter administration to implement protections for disabled peoples’ rights, sparking a national movement and leading to the creation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Candid, intimate, and irreverent, Judy Heumann’s memoir about resistance to exclusion invites readers to imagine and make real a world in which we all belong. - (Random House, Inc.)

Kirkus Reviews

A driving force in the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act looks back on a long career of activism. "An Occupation Army of Cripples Has Taken Over the San Francisco Federal Building." So shouted a newspaper headline in the wake of one particularly vocal protest. According to disability rights activist Heumann, that was fine. "People weren't used to thinking of us as fighters—when they thought about us at all," she observes. Until the 1980s, disabled people were largely made invisible, with no easy means of access to the systems of transportation, employment, and other goods that the rest of the population often takes for granted. The author, who was paralyzed after a bout of childhood polio, might have been shunted off to an institution, as one doctor recommended, which was the usual practice in 1949. Instead, her parents, orphans of the Holocaust, resisted. The system did not make much allowance for her outside such an institution. At first, she was taught by a teacher who came to her home for two and a half hours a week, then sent to "Health Conservation 21," a New York school system program in which students were expected to remain "until we were twenty-one years old, at which point we were supposed to enter a sheltered workshop." Instead, Heumann distinguished herself academically and got involved in the drafting of legislation that would effectively add disability to the classes of protected citizens under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. To do so, she had to make the case that "discrimination against disabled people existed," something that many people did not wish to acknowledge. Then she had to find allies inside government on top of battling a host of foes, including conservative politicians and businesses "worried about what ADA would cost, in time and money." Heumann prevailed, and following passage of the ADA after years of agitation, she worked for the World Bank and was appointed a representative of the Obama administration to advance civil rights for disabled persons internationally. A welcome account of politics in action, and for the best of causes. Copyright Kirkus 2019 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.