My book is out today! If you find yourself having a body—or rather, *being* a body—it might be for you. Can I tell you some stories and ideas in it? They start with the question packed into the cover design itself: +

The words are bursting the seams and edges of the book all over the jacket, posing the question that’s throughout its chapters: What Can A Body Do? And, well—it depends. Is the type too big to fit, or is the book too small to contain it?

It's a mix of journalism, history, and analysis about the many, many bodies we’re in, and the tools we use to adapt ourselves to the world, and the world, in turn, to ourselves. It travels in scale, from personal gear to furniture, architecture, streets, and beyond. Like Chris:

Chris was born with one arm, and for him, a “universal” prosthesis hasn’t been useful. But he did rig up this clever tool for changing his baby’s diaper. Chris’s tool is one instance in a *vast* fascinating history of prosthetics:

The legacy of war injury, the dream of a “cyborg” self, the hard questions for all of us: What parts would replace the things that matter, if and when our bodies change? LIMB also includes the Jaipur Foot, the amazing Audre Lorde thinking about loss and life after a mastectomy.

CHAIR includes the history of the high-end status symbol of the Aeron model. Like many designs, it had its start in conditions of disability—in this case, aging. But what’s the history of why we sit, ergonomics and elevations off the ground? Chairs are a whole index of ideas.

and we look at a lot of them and all the ways we sit down, including the radical practice of customized cardboard chairs built at @adaptivedesign.

In ROOM, we look at what architects often call the “envelope” of our interiors, including DeafSpace at Gallaudet, how civil rights leaders at Berkeley turned a hospital into a dorm, and the work Steve Saling, who has ALS and designed a home space for life with limited mobility.

The envelope is also what environmental psychologists call an “action setting”—a combination of physical cues and behaviors that we pick up in the rooms of our lives. As our bodies change, how will we think about the actions set up in our schools, our offices, our voting booths?

STREET takes us outside: a prosthesis for outdoor sensory processing that an autistic 10 yo built with an artist at MIT, the history of curb cuts, a village designed for dementia. Here the action settings are profound: getting into public space = getting into the public sphere.

And the design of the street, like the on-demand extra crosswalk seconds provided by the Green Man + program in Singapore, gets to the hardest design question of all:

It's an idea-object: CLOCK. What happens when there’s no materially designed thing that will do, when the time of economic productivity, speed, and efficiency measure our lives? Design for slowness demands good ideas, but much more: different ideas of human worth altogether.

Trust me: what disabled people call "crip time" offers a ferocious, exacting, necessary wisdom for all of us. It'll shake your foundations, I think, like it did mine.

Every book is a family tree (h/t @MUFarchitecture) and this one is too: ten years of learning from, getting mentored by, reading and metabolizing disabled people and scholars. You’ll find them everywhere in my book, and you’ll find amazing voices in other books out now!

This year alone: @SFdirewolf, @jaivirdi, @elizguffey + @besswww, @judithheumann, and upcoming from @riva_lehrer! More besides. Such good company. Own Voices, first-person narratives, works of scholarship and works of reportage. Not just a family tree: a whole garden.

This newbie forgot to include a link to purchase—here it is! Lots of outlets here, including Bookshop: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/561049/what-can-a-body-do-by-sara-hendren/