BiblioVault - Books about Disclosure

Eucharistic Presence

A Study in the Theology of Disclosure

Robert Sokolowski

Catholic University of America Press, 1994

Family Matters

Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption

E. Wayne Carp

Harvard University Press, 1998

Adoption is a hot topic--played out in the news and on TV talk shows, in advice columns and tell-all tales--but for the 25 million Americans who are members of the adoption triad of adoptees, adoptive parents, and birth parents, the true story of adoption has not been told until now. Family Matters cuts through the sealed records, changing policies, and conflicting agendas that have obscured the history of adoption in America and reveals how the practice and attitudes about it have evolved from colonial days to the present.

Amid recent controversies over sealed adoption records and open adoption, it is ever more apparent that secrecy and disclosure are the defining issues in American adoptions--and these are also the central concerns of E. Wayne Carp's book. Mining a vast range of sources (including for the first time confidential case records of a twentieth-century adoption agency), Carp makes a startling discovery: openness, not secrecy, has been the norm in adoption for most of our history; sealed records were a post-World War II aberration, resulting from the convergence of several unusual cultural, demographic, and social trends.

Pursuing this idea, Family Matters offers surprising insights into various notions that have affected the course of adoption, among them Americans' complex feelings about biological kinship versus socially constructed families; the stigma of adoption, used at times to promote both openness and secrecy; and, finally, suspect psychoanalytic concepts, such as "genealogical bewilderment," and bogus medical terms, such as "adopted child syndrome," that paint all parties to adoption as psychologically damaged.

With an unswerving gaze and incisive analysis, Carp brings clarity to a subject often muddled by extreme emotions and competing agendas. His book is essential reading for adoptees and their adoptive and biological families, and for the countless others who follow their fortunes.

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Kazimir Malevich

The Climax of Disclosure

Rainer Crone and David Moos

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Kasimir Malevich's (1878-1935) sudden and startling realization of a nonrepresentational way of painting, which he called Suprematism, stands as a seminal moment in twentieth-century art. Rainer Crone and David Moos trace the artist's development from his beginnings in the Ukraine to his involvement with Futurist circles in Moscow through to the late 1920s and beyond. They convincingly demonstrate that Malevich's late representational painting, still widely misunderstood, solidifies his extraordinarily inventive stance.

Against the historical background of distinctly Russian progressive cultural and scientific movements, the authors define affinities between Malevich's work and other nonpolitical revolutions: relativity and quantum theory in physics; the work of Roman Jakobson and the "Prague School" in linguistics; and the exploration of language in the writings of the poet Velimir Khlebnikov. They situate the artist within the fundamental epistemological shift from nineteenth-century objectivity to an all-pervasive modernist subjectivity, relying upon Malevich's contribution to illustrate the ways cultural production is mediated through various modes of transmission.

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Negotiating Disability

Disclosure and Higher Education

Stephanie L. Kerschbaum, Laura T. Eisenman, and James M. Jones, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2017

Disability is not always central to claims about diversity and inclusion in higher education, but should be. This collection reveals the pervasiveness of disability issues and considerations within many higher education populations and settings, from classrooms to physical environments to policy impacts on students, faculty, administrators, and staff. While disclosing one’s disability and identifying shared experiences can engender moments of solidarity, the situation is always complicated by the intersecting factors of race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. With disability disclosure as a central point of departure, this collection of essays builds on scholarship that highlights the deeply rhetorical nature of disclosure and embodied movement, emphasizing disability disclosure as a complex calculus in which degrees of perceptibility are dependent on contexts, types of interactions that are unfolding, interlocutors’ long- and short-term goals, disabilities, and disability experiences, and many other contingencies.

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Sexual Assault

The Dilemma of Disclosure, The Question of Conviction

Rita F. Gunn

University of Manitoba Press, 1988