The Ragged Edge.

Before the Americans with Disabilities Act was law, here in Chicago and around the country we would protest the inaccessibility of public-transit buses by parking our wheelchairs in front of them in the streets. While reading The Ragged Edge, I was looking for words that captured the kick of bus blocking. This anthology from the first fifteen years of the Disability Rag, the gimp-radical's Bible, is supposed to express "the disability experience," and nothing expresses my disability experience better than the defiant job of bagging a bus.

I found what I was looking for in Laura Hershey's tribute to the late Wade Blank, the phenomenal activist who pretty much originated the tactic. Blocking buses, Hershey quotes Blank as saying, is "like giving the finger to the white man."

This intense collection of essays, articles, and poetry gives you the kind of no-holds-barred disability-awareness crash course that Health and Human Services employees received when several hundred members of ADAPT, Blank's vanguard radical group, barricaded them in their Chicago regional office by blocking all entrances. We were protesting idiotic Medicaid rules that imprison disabled folk in nursing homes. Rag founder Mary Johnson gives her account of that day, saying trapped bureaucrats (no doubt in the throes of nicotine fits) were referring to the protesters as "vultures" and "beasts." That means it was a day well spent. The bureaucrats respect us more genuinely when they see us as hoodlums than when they see us as tragic heroes like Tiny Tim.

The Ragged Edge shows why writing with an attitude has put this bimonthly newspaper leagues beyond most other disability publications, almost all of which are so lightweight you have to put a brick on them to keep them from floating away. It stokes the fires by exposing disability bigotry in its most grotesque forms. The uninitiated and jaded alike are bound to gasp frequently and come away shaking their heads.

It's not all dismal. There's power and celebration, too. But the pieces that are most illuminating are those that indict past and present forces from Nazis to the ACLU that have nurtured, exploited, and been sucked in by lethal disability myths. In "Springtime for Hitler," Kahti Wolfe takes a chilling tour of the Holocaust Museum and faces up to the reality that because of her blindness, she would have been among the first to be exterminated in Nazi Germany.

Lisa Blumberg's "Eugenics and Reproductive Choice" shows how some things aren't much better today. She sounds an ominous alarm by citing the Darwinistic bile of a well-known lawyer and self-proclaimed fetal-rights advocate who thinks that the only time abortion should be permitted and even encouraged is when it comes to wiping out burdensome fetuses like those with muscular dystrophy.

Muscular dystrophy! That's my disability. This living and breathing lawyer who is revered enough in her profession to have been quoted in the Journal of the American Bar Association would have me dead!

And there's a section called "The Pity Ploy," which in itself is worth the price of admission. Here and throughout The Ragged Edge, it's made clear why the charity paradigm as personified by Jerry Lewis and his telethon is so reviled in the disability community. We don't need pity. We need to rectify a system that rewards insanely lucrative enterprises, like the $60 billion nursing-home empire, for exploiting us.

The collection has but one flaw, which is the flaw of the Rag itself. It's completely humorless. Disability bigotry is a juicy target for parody and satire, but there's none of that here.

Nevertheless, if this book doesn't get you riled up, I suggest you have your pulse checked.