Home | Away

Saturday, January 17, 2004

Book club recommendation # 2

Just arrived at my doorstep yesterday: Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Reader, edited by Steven Noll and James W. Trent Jr.  I’ve only flipped through it so far, but it looks terrific.  Noll and Trent are two of the best historians in the field (see Noll’s Feeble-Minded in Our Midst: Institutions for the Mentally Retarded in the South, 1900-1940 and Trent’s Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States), and anyone interested in the history of citizenship and state policy in the United States-- that’s the history of citizenship, not just the history of the “mentally retarded,” for any of you who might not consider the history of mental retardation sufficiently interesting or important in and of itself-- should give this thing a look.

Full disclosure: I have a brief, chatty, inconsequential essay in the volume, a lightly revised version of “Family Values,” also available here.  But I assure you that (a) I’m not recommending the book for that reason and (b) I have no pecuniary interest in promoting the book.  Personally, I’d much rather have submitted a later and more substantial essay for inclusion in the book, my Dissent essay on “Disability and Citizenship” (also available right here), since that would’ve been more in keeping with the quality and the direction of the rest of the contributions, but I didn’t have that option, because . . . well, because I didn’t write that essay until late 2002, a year or two too late for this collection.  So tell NYU Press that you’d like to have your very own copy of Noll and Trent, and tell ‘em I told you, and also tell ‘em I told you that you could skip my essay and read everything else instead.

Posted by Michael on 01/17 at 05:17 AM
(23) Trackbacks • Permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages