What Can a Body Do?

How We Meet the Built World

By: Sara Hendren

Narrated by: Sara Hendren

Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's summary

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and LitHub

Winner of the 2021 Science in Society Journalism Book Prize

A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all.

Furniture and tools, kitchens and campuses and city streets—nearly everything human beings make and use is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless, or until, a misfit between our own body and the world is acute enough to be understood as disability, we may never stop to consider—or reconsider—the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built.

In a series of vivid stories drawn from the lived experience of disability and the ideas and innovations that have emerged from it—from cyborg arms to customizable cardboard chairs to deaf architecture—Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body’s stunning capacity for adaptation—rather than a rigid insistence on “normalcy”—look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.

©2020 Sara Hendren (P)2020 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

2020, Massachusetts Book Award

"What Can a Body Do? models its subject. It has well-made sentences and an elegant structure. . . . But Hendren’s project also has a kind of deep beauty that is neither separable from design nor fully accountable to it. Some molecular-level harmony obtains when writing seems so committed to being both interesting and humane. . . . Hendren’s humanism shines…. As [she] writes, disability ‘reveals just how unfinished the world really is.’ Her gift, perhaps, is to see that as an invitation.” —The New Yorker

“In prose infused with tenderness, Hendren tosses away the idea that disability is a problem to be solved and instead shows how humans’ adaptation to the built environment is a wonder to behold.” —NPR

"For Hendren, disability is not a problem to be solved or a flaw to be cured: diverse bodies generate alternative understandings of the built world and should encourage us to question what we accept as ‘standard.’”—The Baffler

Excellent

This book is extraordinary. Sensitive, insightful, and very clearly written. I really can’t recommend it enough.

Very necessary

Moving , articulate , necessary, thoughtful, inspiring- wonderful book - listen, read, think about these ideas so great

Possibly the best resource currently available

This book was so much more than I expected. Sara Hendren does an incredible job of examining the concepts of adaptive and universal design in both practical and philosophical ways. She draws important connections between physical and social space that are often overlooked in discussion of accessibility. She is also a wonderful narrator.

A Complete and Necessary Perspective Shift

The fact that this book is such an easy, unassuming read disguises its power. Disability is a valuable, often-ignored lens through which we can better understand each other and the ways we shape our environments. Hendren is a curious narrator and patient guide for the unfamiliar. The way she gently unveils each layer of this expansive approach to the built world, moving from personal objects to rooms to cities to time(!) is masterful. This is a lovely and important work.

an absolute must read

for anyone involved in education, design, health care, planning, human services. Sara Hendren, in completely accessible language and beautiful storytelling, takes us into the possibility of a world where every body and every kind of brain is not just accepted but fully involved.

well written and accessible

I loved this book. I am a visually impaired artist and educator and this book had a great flow and some incredible examples from lived experiences. I would have really liked an image description of the iso sign that was newly created and also more daily life examples of Grahams encounters with the world. that said I acknowledge that I am only able to share this feedback because of this sense of safety I felt rewarding this book. thanks for this thoughtful and articulate book.

I needed this book!

This book explodes with imagination, compassion and hope while at the same bringing me into a sober confrontation with the reality of needfulness.

Well written and thought provoking

The author gives thought and Care to both the individuals whose stories she tells, and have those stories relate to larger questions and narratives