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Sipping Dom Pérignon through a straw : reimagining success as a disabled achiever / Eddie Ndopu.

by Ndopu, Eddie.

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Legacy Lit, c2023.

362.43092 N337s

Human rights advocacy -- Biography.

People with disabilities -- Education (Higher) -- Biography.

People with disabilities -- South Africa -- Biography.

People with disabilities, Black -- Biography.

9780306829062 (hc.)

228 p. : col. ill. ; 24 cm.

"Global humanitarian Eddie Ndopu's rousing memoir about being both profoundly disabled and profoundly successful without trading one for the other. Eddie Ndopu grew up loving pop music and reruns of 'The Bold and the Beautiful,' and as an adult he would become a globe-trotting disability activist. By his early twenties, he had rocketed through every boundary put in front of him -- a queer, Black wheelchair user -- challenging bias at the highest echelons of power and prestige. Born with spinal muscular atrophy, a rare degenerative motor neuron disease affecting his physical mobility, Eddie was told that he wouldn't live beyond age five. But using his razor-sharp mind and grit, Eddie became the first-ever disabled African awarded a full scholarship to the prestigious Oxford University for a master's degree in public policy, a remarkable feat worthy of a toast. But beyond the challenges that students face-making it to class on time, managing steamy crushes, and being student body president-Eddie faced obstacles as a disabled individual that often go unnoticed and unaddressed, namely a revolving door of care aides. Saddled with the burden of raising money to cover his most basic needs: a care aide, financial aid, and disability accommodations, Eddie writes about his fight for financial aid and his continued advocacy for the rights of people with disabilities. Sipping Dom Pérignon Through a Straw follows Eddie as he scales the mountain of success only to find exclusion, discrimination, and neglect still lying in wait on the other side. Written with his one good finger, Eddie's vibrant prose delivers a clarion call to underdogs everywhere to stop climbing mountains and start moving them instead."--From publisher.

"In his sharp, illuminating debut memoir, South African disability rights advocate Ndopu chronicles his trials and triumphs as a disabled gay Black man enrolled at Oxford University. Diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy, which weakens the body’s skeletal muscles, at age two, and not expected to live beyond age five, Ndopu defied all medical models. After graduating from college, he was accepted into the Master’s in Public Policy program at Oxford. Initially elated, Ndopu quickly settled into something more like optimistic ambivalence after he arrived at the university. Though he felt proud of receiving recognition from such a prestigious institution, he was an outsider among his able-bodied peers, dealing with a rotating cast of care aides and lamenting the school’s lack of accommodations for people with disabilities. Wryly detailing the costs and complications of his attendance at Oxford, Ndopu shines a light on ableism both conscious and unconscious (“Within a span of half a day, I’d been shuttled between care aides like a young person who’d fallen through the cracks of the foster care system, and now I was being prevented from using the bathroom,” he laments early on). This raw yet triumphant tale should be required reading."--Publishers Weekly.

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