Personal injustice
Humans are usually not nice and rarely bright when simple justice is concerned. In this most advanced country, tall people are more likely to become CEOs or presidents of the United States than short people; white males make more money than blacks or hispanics, women make less money than men, fat people have more trouble finding a job: the list goes on. We want so much to show that we are successful and superior that we buy big cars to go nowhere. This mentality makes little people and deaf people divide themselves into subcategories of hell: "My boyfriend has left me because I can talk" says this young friend of mine. At the end of the day, all of us suffer from being shunned by another group. I guess that the original sin is that we always want somebody else to be miserable. We would be better off learning about each other miseries, obstacles and self-definitions and realize that we are all "normal" and all equal.
Injustice is a fact of life. There is not much I can do about it, except remind you that it is ridiculous and very inelegant to think of others as inferiors in any way. Apart from that, I can offer a list of good books, starting with the greatest injustice of all: dying.
Death: Randy Pausch The Last Lecture
Autism: Temple Grandin Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior
Black: Ralph Ellison Invisible Man
Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye***
Blind: Jacques Lusseyran And There Was Light: Autobiography of Jacques Lusseyran, Blind Hero of the French Resistance
Geerat Vermeij Privileged Hands: A Scientific Life
Cancer: Lance Armstrong It's Not About the Bike
Difference: Richard Lavoie It's So Much Work to Be Your Friend: Helping the Child with Learning Disabilities Find Social Success
John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men***
One of the most striking stories about a child: Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Conrad Aiken can be found in this good book Fifty Great American Short Stories
Dreamers: Secret Lives of Walter Mitty and of James Thurber and Richard Brautigan's Dreaming of Babylon
Gay: When I was a child, my parents were friends or friendly with the son of Oscar Wilde. Because of the trial where Wilde was accused of being gay, the family changed names, but Wilde's two sons still had unhappy lives. Vyvyan Holland came to our house. I remember him as a soft-spoken man, very shy, self-defeating and rather sad. His brother had died during the first world war, and Vyvyan thought he died because he wanted to be a hero to erase the shame. So his book is my best pick: it does not talk about gay people, just how society affects their family. Vyvyan Holland Son of Oscar Wilde***
Little people: Yehuda Koren, Eilat Negev In Our Hearts We Were Giants: The Remarkable Story of the Lilliput Troupe. A Dwarf Family's Survival of the Holocaust
Melancholy: Joshua Wolf Shenk Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness
Marci Shimoff Happy for No Reason
Mute: David Wrobleski The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
Spinal cord: Christopher Reeve Still Me
How to look at people: look for the best in each person! Follow this short story from Jerome K. Jerome which had a great influence on me, Passing of the Third Floor Back that you can find here.
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