REASONABLE PEOPLE(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　Watch an interview with DJ on CNN
　　Listen to Ralph Savarese’s interview on NPR’s “The Diane Rehm
Show”
　　Visit the book’s website:
　　”Why would someone adopt a badly abused, nonspeaking,
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. In this emotional page-turner, DJ reconnects with
the sister from whom he was separated, begins to type
independently, and explores his experience of disability, poverty,
abandonment, and sexual abuse. “Try to remember my life,” he says
on his talking computer, and remember he does in the most
extraordinarily perceptive and lyrical way.
　　Asking difficult questions about the nature of family, the demise
of social obligation, and the meaning of neurological difference,
Savarese argues for a reasonable commitment to human possibility
and caring.

　　Ralph James Savarese
　　Poet, essayist, translator, and scholar, Ralph James Savarese
teaches American literature and creative writing at Grinnell
College. He lives in Grinnell, Iowa.

　　Publishers Weekly
　　Savarese writes with passion and humor, careful to include
extensive excerpts from DJ’s typing, so readers get a sense of his
remarkable growth.
　　Library Journal
　　…readers will find the elements documenting the foster care
system worthwhile.
　　The Autism Acceptance Project Newsletter
　　This is… a story about what life is all about: trial, error,
perseverance, and faith in people. Faith in love. Ralph, Emily and
DJ give us that, and much more.
　　Booklist
　　Savarese’s careful melding of memoir and passionate advocacy for
the disabled informs and inspires.
　　GQ
　　That [Reasonable People] manages to avoid both polemic and cliché
is reason enough to applaud.
　　Newsweek
　　By the end of Savarese’s moving memoir, DJ is in sixth grade and
getting all “A’s” at regular school… “They think well-respected,
tested-as-normal kids are the OK-to-teach ones,” writes DJ [in the
book’s final chapter]. “They forget these lost kids.” Perhaps this
book will help others remember they are more than worth the
effort
　　Body+Soul
　　A moving memoir, it calls for “living with conviction in a
cynical time.”