Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal Book

The author takes a short bus around the country to interview freaks, weirdos, and other seemingly bizarre people who may or may not have been diagnosed with a disability.

Mooney is no outsider, as being labeled dyslexic himself, he went through similar experiences as the rest of his interviewees. This is a good thing, in my opinion, as it gets away from the "look at these abnormal people who are not like us, but are special in their own way" attitude and more of a "we are all weird, and that is good" attitude.

Well, kind of. My biggest complaint is in fact the author's perspective. His experiences are quite similar to mine - a "hopeless case" who "defies the odds" and ends up going to a great college and doing work that seems in direct conflict with his disability. Hell, while I was never nearly as popular in high school as him, my most popular period was the direct result of PE classes in my senior year where I was one of the best soccer players (Mooney was a soccer player and went to college on a soccer scholarship). But, our attitudes are not the same. I never strove to be "normal", to "cure' myself. I embraced what I was and, because of my experiences, did my best to embrace others for their differences. Mooney's path took him to becoming a "normal" kid, a jock who made fun of other different kids. While not entirely like his teenage self, he still holds some of the same feelings. Multiple times in the book, he has great apprehension with meeting with some of the people, particularly the people with the more obvious, "uncomfortable" disabilities, even going as far as considering blowing them off and driving on. While he is indeed moving away from being the "supercrip" (IE, a person with a disability who "overcomes" her/his disability, serving as an inspirational story for typical people and something to be aspired to - a role model of how one should act and behave - for disabled people), there are points at which I am totally shocked by his thoughts and opinions of other people. While each encounter generally ends well ("Wow! What a unique, special person who is more like a typical person than everyone realizes!"), I keep getting the feeling that he feels himself separate and unlike from the people he meets, relating more the typical people in his interviewees' lives.

While his attitude irks me, I do admit that it leads to better, more powerful book. The majority of the people who read this are not going to be like me. While it is certainly important for the disability community to have books about "us", written by "us", influencing the attitudes of the rest the world is also important. What Mooney did was create a book that typical people can relate to, which is something that I doubtfully could do. The biggest complaints that I see for the general population about books written from "our" perspective is that is their inability to understand and emphasize with the narrator, but Mooney has emotions, thoughts, and reactions that an average person would have, making him a superior author for communicating this message to others not like "us".

Other things that are commendable about Mooney's writing is his inclusion of a large variety of different types of people, specifically those with "invisible" (generally non-apparent/obvious) disabilities, instead of just focusing on the "big three" (deaf/blind/mobility impaired). This is likely due to his own disability, and this makes him one of the few writers that someone with dyslexia/LD really get to relate with, since most of the older writings from the disability community comes from someone of the "big three" persuasion. He also emphasizes the importance of uniqueness and diverseness over a homogenized population as well as the trickiness of labels, both medical (being labeled as "disabled" or not, different types of labels for effectively the same time and what they mean) and social (what people call each other and how people self identify).

In all, an excellent piece of work. Even though it was not exactly directed at people like me, there is plenty I can take from the book, and I certainly recognize if importance for other audiences.