In A Time to Dance A Time to Run Maria, a gifted German prima ballerina, is breathtaking and graceful on the stage-scrambling and scurrying on the streets-streets that first echo the clicks of Nazi boots, and then melt when allied bombs collapse the sky and incinerate the cities. Forging a career in dance is difficult enough for her, but with gutted theaters, disrupted performances, destroyed costumes, and a ration of pound of meat per month, it is unimaginable how she could survive. Through all this, she is loved and admired for her sense of humor in addition to her elegance and talent, which propel her to renown. Fleeing to the Black Forest to avoid Hitler's draft into his Elite Corps of Entertainers, it is Maria's ballet training that repeatedly saves her life as she thwarts the advances of brutal occupying French soldiers and Arab mercenaries. She realizes that there is no refuge for any innocent German civilian-anywhere. As the Allies occupy her country, Maria is startled by the admiration of an American officer who sees her dance, and wants to meet her. Their courtship flowers into love in spite of the fact that the war deems them enemies. Germans of post war devastation, and ultimately brings her and their child to America.

In A Time to Dance A Time to Run Maria, a gifted German prima ballerina, is breathtaking and graceful on the stage-scrambling and scurrying on the streets-streets that first echo the clicks of Nazi boots, and then melt when allied bombs collapse the sky and incinerate the cities. Forging a career in dance is difficult enough for her, but with gutted theaters, disrupted performances, destroyed costumes, and a ration of pound of meat per month, it is unimaginable how she could survive. Through all this, she is loved and admired for her sense of humor in addition to her elegance and talent, which propel her to renown. Fleeing to the Black Forest to avoid Hitler's draft into his Elite Corps of Entertainers, it is Maria's ballet training that repeatedly saves her life as she thwarts the advances of brutal occupying French soldiers and Arab mercenaries. She realizes that there is no refuge for any innocent German civilian-anywhere. As the Allies occupy her country, Maria is startled by the admiration of an American officer who sees her dance, and wants to meet her. Their courtship flowers into love in spite of the fact that the war deems them enemies. Germans of post war devastation, and ultimately brings her and their child to America.

Drawn from the Genetics, Disability and Deafness Conference at Gallaudet University in 2003, this trenchant volume brings together 13 essays from science, history, and the humanities, history and the present, to show the many ways that disability, deafness, and the new genetics interact and what that interaction means for society. Pulitzer-prize-winning author Louis Menand begins this volume by expressing the position shared by most authors in this wide-ranging forum--the belief in the value of human diversity and skepticism of actions that could eliminate it through modification of the human genome. Nora Groce creates an interpretive framework for discussing the relationship between culture and disability.
From the historical perspective, Brian H. Greenwald comments upon the real "toll" taken by A. G. Bell's insistence upon oralism, and Joseph J. Murray recounts the 19th century debate over whether deaf-deaf marriages should be encouraged. John S. Schuchman's chilling account of deafness and eugenics in the Nazi era adds wrenching reinforcement to the impetus to include disabled people in genetics debates.
Mark Willis illustrates the complexity of genetic alterations through his reaction to his own genetic makeup, in that he is happy to combat his heart disease with genetic tools but refuses to participate in studies about his blindness, which he considers a rich variation in human experience. Anna Middleton describes widely reported examples of couples attempting to use genetic knowledge and technology both to select for and against a gene that causes deafness.
Chapters by Orit Dagan, Karen B. Avraham, Kathleen S. Arnos, and Arti Pandya elucidate the promise of currentresearch to clarify the complexity and choices presented by breakthroughs in genetic engineering. In his essay on the epidemiology of inherited deafness, geneticist Walter E. Nance emphasizes the importance of science in offering individuals knowledge from which they can fashion their own decisions. Christopher Krentz reviews past and contemporary fictional accounts of human alteration that raise moral questions about the ever-continuing search for human perfection. Michael Berube concludes this extraordinary collection with his forceful argument that disability should be considered democratically in this era of new genetics to ensure the full participation of disabled people themselves in all decisions that might affect them.