What Can a Body Do?
How We Meet the Built World
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Narrated by:
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Sara Hendren
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By:
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Sara Hendren
About this listen
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 AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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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
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Story
Our greatest need is to be recognized—to be seen, loved, and embedded in rich relationships with those around us. But for the last century, we’ve displaced that need with the ease of technology. We’ve dreamed of mastery without relationship (what the premodern world called magic) and abundance without dependence (what Jesus called Mammon). Yet even before a pandemic disrupted that quest, we felt threatened and strangely out of place: lonely, anxious, bored amid endless options, oddly disconnected amid infinite connections.
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Way too much scripture
- By Lee Nettles on 05-11-22
By: Andy Crouch
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Glimmer
- How Design Can Transform Your Life and Maybe Even the World
- By: Warren Berger
- Narrated by: Ax Norman
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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The first book to reveal how thinking like a designer can help solve the greatest challenges we face in business, society, and our daily lives. What can we learn from the ways great designers think-and how can it improve our world? In this highly original book by journalist Warren Berger, in collaboration with celebrated designer Bruce Mau, ten groundbreaking principles of design are shown in action-addressing business, social, and personal challenges and improving the way we think, work, and live.
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not for those who know about design thinking...
- By Pierre on 09-06-10
By: Warren Berger
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Small Data
- The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends
- By: Martin Lindstrom
- Narrated by: Ricco Fajardo
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Martin Lindstrom, a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, harnesses the power of "small data" in his quest to discover the next big thing. Hired by the world's leading brands to find out what makes their customers tick, Martin Lindstrom spends 300 nights a year in strangers' homes, carefully observing every detail in order to uncover their hidden desires and, ultimately, the clues to a multimillion-dollar product.
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Fascinating!!
- By Fact addict on 03-08-16
By: Martin Lindstrom
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The Chaos Imperative
- How Chance and Disruption Increase Innovation, Effectiveness, and Success
- By: Ori Brafman, Judah Pollack
- Narrated by: Drew Birdseye
- Length: 4 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Ori Brafman and management consultant Judah Pollack dramatically demonstrate how even the best and most efficient organizations - from Fortune 500 companies to today's US Army - can become more innovative by allowing a little unstructured space and "contained chaos" into their planning and decision-making. Through their consulting work, they realized that while structure and hierarchy are essential both in large corporations and small groups, too much of either can stifle creativity.
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a must read!!
- By Kelly Pavich on 05-26-19
By: Ori Brafman, and others
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The Contemporaries
- Travels in the 21st-Century Art World
- By: Roger White
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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From young artists trying to elbow their way in to those working hard at dropping out, White's essential audiobook offers a once-in-a-generation glimpse of the inner workings of the American art world at a moment of unparalleled ambition, uncertainty, and creative exuberance.
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Mispronunciations Spoil This Reading!
- By Jenny Jenkins on 06-17-15
By: Roger White
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Being Heumann
- An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist
- By: Judith Heumann, Kristen Joiner
- Narrated by: Ali Stroker
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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A story of fighting to belong in a world that wasn't built for all of us and of one woman's activism - from the streets of Brooklyn and San Francisco to inside the halls of Washington - Being Heumann recounts Judy Heumann's lifelong battle to achieve respect, acceptance, and inclusion in society. From fighting to attend grade school after being described as a "fire hazard" to later winning a lawsuit against the New York City school system for denying her a teacher's license because of her paralysis, Judy's actions set a precedent that improved rights for disabled people.
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A must read for everyone
- By Christopher A Cawthon on 09-28-20
By: Judith Heumann, and others
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Wanting
- The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life
- By: Luke Burgis
- Narrated by: Luke Burgis, Sean Patrick Hopkins
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Gravity affects every aspect of our physical being, but there’s a psychological force just as powerful - yet almost nobody has heard of it. It’s responsible for bringing groups of people together and pulling them apart, making certain goals attractive to some and not to others, and fueling cycles of anxiety and conflict. In Wanting, Luke Burgis draws on the work of French polymath René Girard to bring this hidden force to light and reveals how it shapes our lives and societies.
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One of the most important books you'll ever read
- By chris boutte on 06-14-21
By: Luke Burgis
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Why Architecture Matters
- By: Paul Goldberger
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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The purpose of Why Architecture Matters is to "come to grips with how things feel to us when we stand before them, with how architecture affects us emotionally as well as intellectually" - with its impact on our lives. "Architecture begins to matter," writes Paul Goldberger, "when it brings delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads."
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Reading too mechanical
- By Petrie on 09-01-15
By: Paul Goldberger
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Thrive
- Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way
- By: Dan Buettner
- Narrated by: Michael McConnohie
- Length: 7 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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In the first book to identify demographically proven happiness hotspots worldwide, researcher and explorer Dan Buettner documents the happiest people on earth and reveals how we can create our own happy zones. Detailing extraordinary new discoveries and meticulous research on four continents, Buettner observes happiness in unlikely places and gleans surprising insight into what generates contentment and what it means to thrive.
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Around the world with circular reasoning
- By Andy on 05-17-11
By: Dan Buettner
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Mind in Motion
- How Action Shapes Thought
- By: Barbara Tversky
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas.
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Physically difficult to listen to
- By Claire Hay on 11-08-19
By: Barbara Tversky
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Girl Gurl Grrrl
- On Womanhood and Belonging in the Age of Black Girl Magic
- By: Kenya Hunt
- Narrated by: Kenya Hunt, Ebele Okobi, Jessica Horn, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Black women have never been more visible or more publicly celebrated. But for every milestone, every magazine cover, every new face elected to public office, the reality of everyday life for black women remains a complex, conflicted, contradiction-laden experience. An American journalist who has been living in London for a decade, Kenya Hunt has made a career of distilling moments, movements, and cultural moods into words. Her work takes the difficult and the indefinable and makes it accessible; it is razor sharp cultural observation threaded through evocative and relatable stories.
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Inspired
- By Amazon Customer on 01-29-21
By: Kenya Hunt
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Applied Minds
- How Engineers Think
- By: Guru Madhavan
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Through narratives and case studies spanning the brilliant history of engineering, Madhavan shows how the concepts of prototyping, efficiency, reliability, standards, optimization, and feedback are put to use in fields as diverse as transportation, retail, health care, and entertainment. Equal parts personal, practical, and profound, Applied Minds charts a path to a future where we apply strategies borrowed from engineering to create useful and inspired solutions to our most pressing challenges.
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excellent edifying book; great narrator too.
- By Phillip on 01-16-22
By: Guru Madhavan
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The Importance of Being Little
- What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups
- By: Erika Christakis
- Narrated by: Teri Schnaubelt
- Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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A bold challenge to the conventional wisdom about early childhood, with a pragmatic program to encourage parents and teachers to rethink how and where young children learn best by taking the child's eye view of the learning environment.
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Points out many problems; offers no real solution
- By K. Lynn on 08-06-18
By: Erika Christakis
What listeners say about What Can a Body Do?
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- John Lyons
- 08-28-20
Excellent
This book is extraordinary. Sensitive, insightful, and very clearly written. I really can’t recommend it enough.
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- dcp
- 11-03-21
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.
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- Anonymous User
- 11-17-21
Very necessary
Moving , articulate , necessary, thoughtful, inspiring- wonderful book - listen, read, think about these ideas so great
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- L. Hechanova
- 09-15-20
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.
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- Ira David Socol
- 10-08-20
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.
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- sugandha gupta
- 11-08-22
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.
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- leavittate
- 12-01-23
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.
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- Elza Hisel-McCoy
- 02-01-24
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 
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