Normal Sucks
How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines
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- 105,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
Confessional and often hilarious, in Normal Sucks a neuro-diverse writer, advocate, and father offers a radical message of acceptance and empowerment.
Jonathan Mooney blends anecdote, expertise, and memoir to present a new mode of thinking about how we live and learn. As a neuro-diverse kid diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD who didn't learn to read until he was twelve, the realization that he wasn’t the problem—the system and the concept of normal were—saved Mooney's life. Here, he explores the toll that our narrow conception of normal takes on kids and adults both. But, he argues, if we can reorient the ways in which we think about diversity and disability, we can start a revolution.
Mooney has been inspiring audiences with his story for nearly two decades. Now he’s ready to share what he’s learned from parents, educators, researchers, and kids in a book that is both a survival guide and a call to action. Whip-smart and inspiring—and movingly framed as a letter to his own young sons—this book will upend what we call normal and empower us all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mooney (The Short Bus), a speaker on neurological diversity who was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia at age 10, aims to eradicate the word normal from readers' vocabularies with this persuasive analysis. To understand how the concept of normal became a social phenomenon, Mooney traces the word back to its roots as a mathematical term in the 1840s, which referred to the common bell curve. As Mooney tracks the word through the decades (including its usage in eugenics, anatomy, and physiology), it becomes clear that the term creates problems when referring to human behavior and physiology because, in Mooney's words, "normal was created, not discovered, by flawed, eccentric, self-interested, racist, ableist, homophobic, sexist humans. Normal is a statistical fiction." In particular, he rails against the history of vague, flawed standards for measuring and labeling human behavior, particularly when designing treatments that supposedly aim for "patients" to become "normal" as in Mooney's own case. He also argues that grouping some people as "normal" has led to the dehumanization of people who are differently abled or neurodiverse, and believes that each person should be considered in their own right, not compared to a normative standard. Mooney expertly deconstructs normal in this intelligent examination that will shatter preconceived notions.
