I am deeply conflicted about this collection. On the one hand, many of the stories are imaginative, unsettling, and quite literary. On the other hand, they are also confusing, weakly characterized, and somehow not particularly fun to read. Maybe modern fantasy/horror just isn't my thing.

Old Man's War is a perfect love-letter to Starship Troopers. Guy joins military, guy goes to basic, guy gives demo of advanced military hardware, guy fights aliens, guy learns valuable lesson about stuff. What makes Scalzi perfect is the rather clever premise of making his protagonist a 75 year old man rather than pimply youth, avoiding the worst excesses of right-wing politics endemic to military sci-fi, and that Scalzi is just a great writer. Damn, I wish I could string words together like Scalzi. If you haven't read this book, you need to.

This book is a solid review of disability rights in the United States. The book covers a shift from a medical to a civil right paradigm, and covers in depth the passage, provisions, and status of the Americans with Disability Act. Politics, interest groups, and the actions of the courts are the major focuses of the book. There's not enough room to cover everything in detail (the lack section on 504 and special education is a black mark, IMO), but the bibliography is a valuable resource, and within its topics, it's quite readable and comprehensive.

Better than the middle, not as good as the first, but a fine and worthy conclusion to the Number Ten Ox trilogy.

There are moments that feel like they'll last forever, moments that tie the smallest lives to the grandest events. One of those moments was Sputnik in 1957, when a boy in West Virginia looked at a moving light in the sky, and dreamed that he would build a rocket. But unlike a thousand other dreamers, Homer Hickham built his rockets, and in 'Rocket Boys' he takes us back to his childhood in Coalwood, and way in which a whole town achieved escape velocity from the daily tyranny of mining and high school football to dream of the skies.

This book is triumphant, melancholic, nostalgic, and deeply true. Every awkward dreamer and uncertain utopian will see themselves reflected in Homer Hickham. Right now, his childhood seems more real than my own. The story effortlessly blends the personal tribulations of family and high school, scrounging and bartering materials for rockets, and scientific progress from amateur bomb maker to the second best rocket scientist in the United States (#1 being Werner Von Braun).

The only thing that disappoints me with this book is that today, it is much harder to follow in Hickham's footsteps. As a national, we are less adventurous, less crafty, less willing to risk explosions and fire in pursuit of our dreams. But we still have Rocket Boys,

Honestly, it's hard for me to evaluate this book since I am neither a designer nor a person with disabilities. What I can say is that it presents a fresh, punky attitude towards disabilities and assistive technologies, arguing that anything used by person more or less constantly (hearing aid, wheelchair, artificial limb...) must be not just effective in a medical/engineering sense, but also pleasurable and expressive. The book is glossy, a little unbalanced, a manifesto rather than a plan, but it's provocative and very fun.

This is a book that needs no introduction. The Hobbit is the progenitor of pretty much all modern fantasy, even more than the Lord of the Rings it is the prototypical adventure tale. Middle Earth is both epic and intimate. The sentences sparkle and shine like elven jewels, the whole of the book intricately constructed like a coat of dwarven mail.

If you don't love the hobbit, you're no friend of mine.

A solid academic study of disability. Bookended by Baynton's exhortation that we can see disability everywhere in history once we know where to look, Scotch's overview of the growth of disability legislation in the 20th century, the meat of this book focuses on the late 19th century, and the way that the individualized, haphazard, and essentially minimal efforts of the Victorian era gave way to the scientific, bureaucratic, and public policy solutions of the Progressive era. The chapters very between individual and institutional analysis, but are of uniformly high quality.

My edition was the (purported) Coleridge translation. I'm not enough of a literary scholar to judge this work comprehensively, but I can say that I great enjoyed the play of language. At the same time, the characters and plots were deeply alien to my sensibilities. A fascinating and foundational work either way.

This is one of the core books of the disabilities rights movement, an exhilarating journalistic account of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and several magazine length accounts of the lives of people with disabilities. Shapiro makes it clear again and again that the biggest barrier to people with disabilities living a worthwhile life on their own terms are not their impairments, or even the built environment, but social prejudice and a welfare system that funnels money to expensive institutions rather than community based care. This work is more anecdotal than synoptic, and slightly outdated (particularly in its discussion of technological developments), but it covers the major categories of disabilities (blindness, deafness, quadriplegia and cognitive impairments), and tells the stories of people with disabilities.