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groups representing communities, influenced the trajectory of disability reform politics and the movement toward more rights-based or identity-based politics. Pettinicchio periodizes disability reform politics into two stages. The first—beginning in the 1920s—follows a “client-service model,”where legislator–volunteer partnerships focus on providing rehabilitative services to “help the disabled help themselves” (p. 19). This period is marked by several key characteristics. First, government actors see themselves as pioneers in supporting large-scale practical and evidence-based approaches to helping individuals with disabilities become self-sufficient. In their own words, legislators of the time envisioned their role as “provid [ing] opportunities to ‘the unfortunate people who have been handicapped’” and to help them “become thoroughly independent of any help in order to take care of [their] personal affairs” (p. 40). Second, these “rehabilitative” services are targeted to specific challenges; there is no conception of “disabled” as a unifying broad-based community or identity. Third, because of their expertise and the complexities of client needs, disability service providers and organizations achieve an “elite status” and are consulted by “legislators and bureaucrats...as community representatives, helping to both ensure and entrench rehabilitation policies and programs” (p. 33). In this way, this phase of disability policy reform follows a trajectory of stakeholder entrenchment and client demand that typifies many social welfare programs. Social policy initiatives fill critical needs and motivate client demands for service provision and for innovation provided by technically trained professionals. By the late 1970s, disability-focused organizations outpaced organizations focused on race and gender. However, as Pettinicchio points out, even as late as the 1960s, when rights-framed movements were in full swing, there was still no conception of disability rights—nor was there an advocacy-based approach to fighting for access or accommodations. The shift to phase two, from services to rights—and rehabilitation to accommodation—Pettinicchio tells us, is as much a story about legislator narrative as it is about a rights-basedmovement. Legislators are moved to action by their personal connections to legislative aides or grandchildren who have contended with service or structural barriers. These experiences drive legislative efforts to draft, sponsor, and market legislation. Pettinicchio highlights the ways in which these narratives catalyzed legislative support for the first whispers of disability rights—for thinking about the challenges of disability as problems of societal accommodation rather than only individual capabilities. Personal appeals, coupled with structural innovations in Congress (the creation of the Senate Subcommittee on the Handicapped) provided both space and leverage for legislators and providers to push for rightsbased language—language that would address universal principles of nondiscrimination and accommodation—to be included in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. By highlighting this two-step process from service provision to barrier reduction and self-sufficiency to civil rights, Pettinicchio reveals the significance of disability politics reform—not only as an important (yet distinct) story of civil rights policy but also, more broadly, as a window into agenda setting, interest group formation, and a rights evolution. Of course, no project—particularly not one as ambitious as Politics of Empowerment—can adequately cover every nuance of a policy debate or every aspect of scholarly intervention. Thus, there are two noteworthy omissions that scholars should be aware of —particularly as they are thinking about how best to use this book in a classroom setting. First, Pettinicchio’s treatment of political science and public policy scholarship is limited. Although the book offers an abundance of empirical material—detailed descriptions of legislative maneuvering, in-depth analyses of hearing testimony— there is far less engagement with the political science scholarship that would help readers contextualize these findings within established scholarly frames. A second, and more empirical, omission is Pettinicchio’s treatment (or lack thereof) of legal doctrine and litigation. Legal advocacy and court action are strangely and noticeably absent from his discussions of the evolution of disability policy reform. The courts played a significant role in interpreting legislative initiatives and providing leverage for providers to push for policy innovations. Furthermore, as the primary institutional engines for rights claims, courts played an especially critical role in devising themeaning and scope of the “reasonable accommodations” doctrine—a core platform for disability rights narratives. Consequently, readers are left with the mistaken impression that courts were of little significance to disability rights reform. However, on the whole, these omissions do not detract from the overall value of the book. Pettinicchio’s research and insights provide a much-needed and important introduction to the broader politics of progress and retrenchment in disability rights legislation.