Friday, July 6, 2007

Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption

Savarese, Ralph James. Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption. New York: Other Press, 2007

Review by Michael Cavanagh
This review originally appeared at Amazon.com Michael Cavanagh gave the Libraries' permission to reprint it on this blog. This is a verbatim copy of that review.

I must declare an interest. Savarese is a faculty colleague of mine. I wouldn't normally write an Amazon review of a colleague's work, but this book is so compelling and inspiring that in the past week since I finished it I have all but stopped strangers on the street to tell about it. There are several reasons to read it. It is a well-informed, thought-provoking and very specific book about autism, of special interest to readers like me who knew about autism only from a distance. It is a close-up and very frank story of an unusual and admirable family. It is (as one of your reviewers put it) an adventure story whose subject is the discovery of a mind and soul and the emergence of a young man into the world. Yet one comes to feel that it is also about all of us. Best of all, it's a great read, a real page-turner, with a novel's power to keep you up until midnight asking youself "what next?"

Science Library RJ506.A9 S38 2007


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