A new, engaging, and informative perspective that redefines what “normal” should really mean.
A challenge to rethink “normal.”
When Mooney (The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal, 2007, etc.) was a child, he was “diagnosed with multiple language-based disabilities and attention deficit disorder. When the educational psychologist broke the news to my mom and me, it was as if someone had died.” For years after, the author struggled to conform to whatever concept of “normal” he thought would help him fit in and stop feeling like a “weird kid.” In this sometimes-humorous and thought-provoking analysis of his childhood, adolescence, and college years, Mooney shares what it was like to be different from the norm, which he astutely points out “is a false standard for human value.” He provides an extensive history of how the idea of normal evolved, giving readers an eye-opening look at the standards we are often forced to live with, whether we know it or not—and whether we have learning disabilities, physical and/or mental disabilities, or in some other way do not fit the traditional picture of normal. Some of the historical research the author cites is horrifying, such as the sterilization techniques and lobotomies used on those with mental disabilities. Mooney discusses the rise of eugenics and how Hitler adopted these ideas for his own Final Solution. He expertly brings the conversation back to a more personal level when he shares how, with the help of a friend, he began to accept his differences and embrace his neurodiversity, wrote a book, and then gave lectures on the benefits of neurodiversity. He touches lightly on the current ideas about the benefits of neurodiversity in society; some readers will wish this section was longer. Throughout, the author encourages readers to reexamine the concept of normality and to embrace the idea that all humans have something to offer society.
A new, engaging, and informative perspective that redefines what “normal” should really mean.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-19016-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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