Hockenberry co-hosting new public radio show, ‘The Takeaway’
April 30th, 2008
From the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, New York Daily News and elsewhere:
Veteran journalist John Hockenberry and former CNN reporter Adaora Udoji have started co-hosting a new public radio morning news program this week. “The Takeaway” will feature lots of live material, and is designed as a counterpoint to NPR’s staid “Morning Edition.” Listeners will be encouraged to interact, respond, and take part in the development of editorial content.
Hockenberry has used a wheelchair since he was 19, a fact that’s not mentioned in the reporting about his new show. Fair enough, since disability is not a focus of the program and probably wasn’t factored into its boosters’ promises that the show will deliver “an unprecedented diversity of news coverage.”
But to give Hockenberry his due, this is as good a time as any to celebrate his 1995 memoir “Moving Violations,” a brutally straightforward explication of the American disability experience (or, as Hockenberry would say, “crip world.”) Pico Iyer, writing in the New York Times, compared Hockenberry with Ralph Ellison, saying his book “could, in fact, be described as an ‘Invisible Man’ for the disabled.”
An excerpt of Iyer’s review:
In “Moving Violations,” his full-throated, driving and highly affecting book, John Hockenberry tells us — even forces us — to treat him no differently than others, and to acknowledge that disability is mostly in the eye of the beholder.
… most of all, this is a kind of anti-segregation text, written by one who knows what it is like to be an invisible man and who, while waiting for a taxi in a busy New York street, sees empty cabs whizzing past and mothers protecting their children from the sight of him.
Readers wanting to know more might enjoy this interview from 1995: On the street with John Hockenberry: Life in an everyday war zone.
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