Dr. Julie Smart has puslished the second edition of her text, Disability, Society, and the Individual.  Many universities, including Cornell, Penn State, Michigan State, and San Francisco State, use this text in various curricula (i.e., Disability Services, Introduction to Disability, Rehabilitation Counseling) to educate students about individuals who have disibilities. The text has consistently received strong reviews. Please see the reviews below, including an excerpt from Dr. Tyra N. Turner's review in the Journal of Rehabilitation.


Reviews
Irmo Marini, Ph.D.,
University of Texas-Pan American

Overall, I highly recommend this book for any graduate or undergraduate course in the psychosocial aspect of disability.  It is a contemporary approach to the topic of disability from a social construct view, full of psychosocial concepts related to disability, and is full of additional resources including video references, Web sites, personal account stories, and critical thinking activities.  As a person with a disability, I felt somewhat relieved to know that a text such as this will be influencing the perspectives of many future non-disabled rehabilitation counselors and the fact that hopefully the days of the medial model and viewing the problem to be with the person with the disability are, in fact, numbered.

This book is a must reading for all those interested in the field or rehabilitation and in the profession of rehabilitation counseling.  It required the reader to examine self, the society in which we live, the perspectives of the person with disability, and the experiences of the individual with disability.  The result of reading this book is the shaping of attitudes that help us to understand the person with disability.  The book can serve as a valuable text providing an important foundation for the developing professional.  It could be one of the major texts for a Foundations course or a Psychosocial Aspects of Disability course.  It should be one of the major texts for all programs in rehabilitation counseling.

Tyra N. Turner, Rh.D., CRC, LAC
University of Arkansas

One of the challenges an individual encounters in reviewing any textbook is to comprehensively and yet succinctly provide the reader with a "preview" of an upcoming attraction. Disability, Society, and the Individual is an attraction that will prove to be a valuable resource for use by rehabilitation counselor educators and educators in the allied health profession. The author provides a very practical yet comprehensive approach to understanding the disability experience. The reviewer was particularly impressed by the utility of the book for rehabilitation counselor educators. It contains structured exercises and discussion questions, and supplemental resources that can be used in a variety of courses.