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Top of the pile
84
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
79/100Critics
81/100Scholars
92/100Author:
Alice Wong
Publisher:
Vintage
Date:
September 6, 2022
This memoir offers a glimpse into an activist's journey to finding and cultivating community and the continued fight for disability justice, from the founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project.
What The Reviewers Say
In 'Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life,' disability rights activist and organizer Alice Wong chronicles her life as a disabled Asian American woman...Through powerful essays, blog posts, interviews, photos and art, Wong offers an intimate and illuminating account of the challenges, joys and frustrations of living in a world not made for people like her...Wong writes powerfully about the financial pressures faced by her family to provide the care she needed, the vulnerability of depending on public programs, and the many forms of discrimination experienced by those who aren’t as physically mobile...Wong is quick to call out an ableist society that sees disabled lives as 'full of suffering and misery'...In a world that can’t see past the limitations of a disabled body, she writes about her happy childhood, her love of food, her joy of writing and being a sci-fi nerd...She acknowledges the kindness she’s received from her family and others in her community, and doesn’t fail to find the humor in her experiences...An empowering read, 'Year of the Tiger' challenges us to check any ableist privilege and reconsider the world we have created – a world that is inaccessible and hostile to the most vulnerable among us..
This collection is part playbook, part scrapbook. It includes transcripts of enlightening and sometimes topically overlapping interviews, tips for conducting interviews based on her experiences, and personal photographs and drawings, including a collaborative graphic essay about the 'truth universally acknowledged that cats know how to live'.
Wong’s memoir is a moving addition to her celebrated body of work as an activist, community organizer, media maker and editor of the 2020 anthology Disability Visibility. In Year of the Tiger, Wong creates a collage of blog posts, artworks, interviews and other ephemera with disability at its center, seasoned generously with her quick wit and fierce calls to action.
The prominent community organizer and founder of the Disability Visibility Project strikes again with an imaginative and insightful memoir about her journey as an activist and her continued fight to dismantle systemic ableism. The text is an eclectic scrapbook of essays, interviews, poems, photos, email chains, memes, and more. Every section is a new discovery that takes the reader through Wong’s childhood memories, policies around public health care, bad media depictions of people with disabilities, various uses of assistive technology, and the future of pandemic-era care. It also includes accessible and collaborative elements, such as image descriptions, artwork by Wong and other artists with disabilities, and quotes from disabled and social justice organizers. Written in a refreshingly frank and honest manner, Wong explores communal joy, grief, and rage and carves out a space for all people to be in conversation with one another.
