It's become something of a trend in the West: recovering the forgotten women of history. The New York Times is publishing a series of obituaries for people ignored by the paper's archives. Italian children's books are doing the same. Slowly, that unnamed past is taking shape again. Women long erased are returning to the page, making it harder to tell a history that overlooks them. But many other excluded voices remain out of focus—which is why SuperAbile Magazine's new book matters. Extraordinary Lives: Stories of Women and Men Who Made a Difference (INAIL 2018) brings together twenty-two portraits: eleven women and eleven men from different eras, countries, and walks of life. What unites them? Each chose to live in a way that challenged the barriers surrounding disability—for themselves and for others.
Musicians, scientists, models, athletes, artists, and activists from every continent. People who are deafblind, paralyzed by polio, living with Asperger's syndrome, injured in accidents, amputees. Each faced enormous obstacles—yet none treated them as limits or impediments. Instead, they engaged them as problems to work through, manage, and dismantle. In doing so, each helped push disability into the center of public conversation.
The book achieves this through simple, precise language and graphic design by Corrado Virgili that avoids all sentimentality. These choices make Extraordinary Lives invaluable—especially for the wider view it offers. Disability, it shows, unfolds in countless forms because it is never the same twice. More importantly: contrary to common belief, these people lived their disability as one aspect of their humanity, not the whole of it. Consider just a few: American Lizzie Velasquez, Cuban Oney Tapia, model Madeline Stuart, zoologist Temple Grandin, Indian dancer Sudha Chandran, British artist Stephen Wiltshire. It would be impossible to reduce them to a single label. In fact, Extraordinary Lives proves it cannot be done.