This book about the early life of a child with Down Syndrome would receive more stars, if the author didn't turn on his "professor" mode and have to write page after page of scholarly discourse! ( )

Seems that most of my reviews respond to other reviews....

Currently, the only other review for this book refers to it as prone to "ranting, pontificating or just being condescending." Clearly the reviewer has Bérubé mixed up with David Horowitz, or perhaps the stable of writers at the National Review. Bérubé's prone to sarcasm, of course, but reading him and taking him to task for his sarcasm is akin to taking Smokey Robinson to task for plaintive smoothness. Sheesh. Know your authors.

Furthermore, there's a reason MB writes about ethics, politics, social policy: because all of these matters directly affect how his son James can live, and because he wants to develop an ethics and politics that doesn't fall into the trap of pure discursive contingency or faith in some transcendental signified (a term he doesn't use in this book, but the idea's there).

Can I take the book to task for some things? Yes. Its falls into a neat anthropocentrism at its end, setting up a relation between 'self awareness' and ethics: sounds to me like Tom Regan's 'subject-of-a-life' and other rights-based ethics. But as these ideas didn't begin to become commonly known as problematic until recent years, Bérubé simply didn't know. Maybe.

Oh, it's about his son James, who has Down Syndrome. It's very moving. Should be supplemented with the 'Jamie' material in 'Rhetorical Occasions.' ( )