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L.J. Davis’s 1971 novel, A Meaningful Life, is a blistering black comedy about the American quest for redemption through real estate and a gritty picture of New York City in collapse. Just out of college, Lowell Lake, the Western-born hero of Davis’s novel, heads to New York, where he plans to make it big as a writer. Instead he finds a job as a technical editor, at which he toils away while passion leaks out of his marriage to a nice Jewish girl. Then Lowell discovers a beautiful crumbling mansion in a crime-ridden section of Brooklyn, and against all advice, not to mention his wife’s will, sinks his every penny into buying it. He quits his job, moves in, and spends day and night on demolition and construction. At last he has a mission: he will dig up the lost history of his house; he will restore it to its past grandeur. He will make good on everything that’s gone wrong with his life, and he will even murder to do it.
The fifth edition of The Disability Studies Reader addresses the post-identity theoretical landscape by emphasizing questions of interdependency and independence, the human-animal relationship, and issues around the construction or materiality of gender, the body, and sexuality. Selections explore the underlying biases of medical and scientific experiments and explode the binary of the sound and the diseased mind. The collection addresses physical disabilities, but as always investigates issues around pain, mental disability, and invisible disabilities as well. Featuring a new generation of scholars who are dealing with the most current issues, the fifth edition continues the Reader’s tradition of remaining timely, urgent, and critical.
In an era when human lives are increasingly measured and weighed in relation to the medical and scientific, notions of what is “normal” have changed drastically. While it is no longer useful to think of a person’s particular race, gender, sexual orientation, or choice as “normal,” the concept continues to haunt us in other ways. In The End of Normal, Lennard J. Davis explores changing perceptions of body and mind in social, cultural, and political life as the twenty-first century unfolds. The book’s provocative essays mine the worlds of advertising, film, literature, and the visual arts as they consider issues of disability, depression, physician-assisted suicide, medical diagnos...
We live in an age of obsession. Not only are we hopelessly devoted to our work, strangely addicted to our favorite television shows, and desperately impassioned about our cars, we admire obsession in others: we demand that lovers be infatuated with one another in films, we respond to the passion of single-minded musicians, we cheer on driven athletes. To be obsessive is to be American; to be obsessive is to be modern. But obsession is not only a phenomenon of modern existence: it is a medical category—both a pathology and a goal. Behind this paradox lies a fascinating history, which Lennard J. Davis tells in Obsession. Beginning with the roots of the disease in demonic possession and its secular successors, Davis traces the evolution of obsessive behavior from a social and religious fact of life into a medical and psychiatric problem. From obsessive aspects of professional specialization to obsessive compulsive disorder and nymphomania, no variety of obsession eludes Davis’s graceful analysis.
This text re-examines issues concerning the relationship between disability and normality in the light of postmodern theory and political activism. It argues that disability can become the new prism through which postmodernity examines and defines itself.
"Nowadays, most readers take the intersection between fiction and fact for granted. We've developed a faculty for pretending that even the most bizarre literary inventions are, for the nonce, real. . . . The value of Davis's book is that it explores the h
WHEN YOU COME FOR THE WRONG MAN Howard Parker wants to be Secretary of Homeland Security. And he isn't going to let a bunch of Marines who were in the wrong place at the wrong time stand in his way — even if one of them is now a reporter in Seattle, his home town. What are the odds? Former Marine Mac Davis likes being a cop reporter. He gets a regular paycheck, and no one is shooting at him. What's not to like? So yeah, he has to hang out around cops, but every job has its downsides. Then someone tries to kill him. Roughs up his aunt. Kidnaps an old Marine buddy. And Mac is going to find out why. And then? He'll put a stop to it. One way or another. If the tools of a reporter won't get the job done? Well then, he's got other tools to use. Book 1 in the Mac Davis thrillers featuring a Marine turned cop reporter in Seattle.
Selected as an "Editors Choice" by the Chicago Tribune Lennard J. Davis grew up as the hearing child of deaf parents. In this candid, affecting, and often funny memoir, he recalls the joys and confusions of this special world, especially his complex and sometimes difficult relationships with his working-class Jewish immigrant parents. Gracefully slipping through memory, regret, longing, and redemption, My Sense of Silence is an eloquent remembrance of human ties and human failings.
"This is a bleakly, blackly hilarious novel by the author of Cowboys Don't Cry about a Maine boy who comes to New York in the '50's because he doesn't have anything better to do, Coffin's only ambition is to have sex, which he accomplishes in what is possibly the anti-classic of its genre ("As for French kissing itself, once he got over the initial shock it turned out to be as bad as he'd always thought it would be"). Faute de mieux, he keeps doing it again and again until his pleasant promiscuous life as a liquor store salesman in a wino-bum-junkie part of Brooklyn is disrupted when a pseudo-hip young businessman with a beautiful and totally amoral wife buys Coffin's tenement and kicks everyone (except Coffin, who won't leave) off the premises. The wife uses Coffin for drugs and sex (in that order), and Coffin discovers the miseries of love for the first time amidst bravura about the rights of statutory tenants and a botched attempt to murder his landlord."--Kirkus.