"More than just looking," writes Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, "staring is an urgent eye jerk of intense interest. Mike Ervin calls it 'the car wreck phenomenon' (2005 interview). We stare when ordinary seeing fails, when we want to know more. So staring is an interrogative gesture that asks what's going on and demands the story."

"The story" is as complex as the human unconscious and as inchoate as the acquired cult of personality; it is as dark as the primal nature of representative politics. "The story" is infused with bodies of difference, bodies with disabilities, and those that are temporarily without disabilities. Above all else, for Garland-Thomson in this richly optimistic book about humanity's oldest internal drama, the story of staring begins where ordinary seeing fails and this failure then posits a place of (re)visioning.

The history of staring is one of subjectivities and tyrannies; from slave markets and freak shows, from military engagements to competitive games, the enactments of interpersonal gazing have long been matters of social advantage. But Staring offers more than a history of abjection. In fact, Garland-Thomson offers a reverie. In effect, her ambition is to offer readers the possibility of post-colonial, post-ableist enactments — a simultaneity of ophthocentric curiosity. One is reminded of Robert Frost's poem "Two Look at Two." When taken as intellectual fascination — where two look at two — staring carries the possibility of mutual satisfactions. This is the reverie of scholars and artists who have lived their lives within the polysemous framings of disabilities. The body is less symbolic than "the stare" it calls forth or is associated with, and this fact offers freedom — gestures toward a poetics, if you will.

The idea that one may stare beyond the disagreeable "car wreck" of broken bodies or bodies of difference was also Susan Sontag's idea, and Garland-Thomson does a fine job of delineating Sontag's notion of the good vs. bad stare — for redemptive staring requires dramatic irony and a good deal of progressive optimism. But what is most interesting about Staring is that very possibility. By interviewing dozens of public figures who must inevitably occupy public space while simultaneously navigating the performative and reactive dynamics of disability, Garland-Thomson demonstrates the liminal opportunity for good staring. If all bodies are symbolic, then people with disabilities offer an opportunity to understand this symbolism and, as this book demonstrates well, the time for such an understanding is now.