"Why would someone adopt a badly abused, non-speaking, six-year-old from foster care?" So, the author was asked at the outset of his adoption-as-a-first-resort adventure. Part love story, part political manifesto about "living with conviction in a cynical time," the memoir traces the development of DJ, a boy written off as profoundly retarded and now, six years later, earning all "A"s at a regular school. Neither a typical saga of autism nor simply a challenge to expert opinion, Reasonable People illuminates the belated emergence of a self in language. And it does so using DJ's own words expressed through the once discredited but now resurgent technique of facilitated communication (FC).
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