The short bus a journey beyond normal

After being classified as learning-disabled in third grade, Mooney rode the "short bus" with other specialed students, a stigma so mortifying he later contemplated suicide. But he persevered, graduating from Brown University and writing a book with David Cole called "Learning Outside the Lines." In his latest book, Mooney travels coast to coast in a dilapidated short bus to interview people "who had once been labeled 'abnormal' or 'disabled.' " These portraits are endearing. He meets an eccentric, possibly autistic man who has befriended a group of mathematicians; a blind and deaf girl who curses in sign language; and a former fisherman who is considering gender reassignment. Mooney makes some discordant attempts at philosophizing in this chatty narrative (his epigraph is from Foucault: "The judges of normality are present everywhere"). And although he thinks the "medical model" of treating developmental disabilities is dehumanizing, he is vague about the "community care" approach he favors. Mooney, who suggests that reading remediation is a waste of time in some cases, suffered as a child not just because he was ostracized but also because he simply wanted to read and couldn't. It's not necessarily more compassionate to tolerate disabilities than to try to correct them. But it feels like bullying to pick on this book's limitations. Mooney's target audience is not policy makers but his fellow misfits, and his boundless empathy will surely console those who also face the worst that cruel schoolchildren and the educational bureaucracy have to offer.

To Mooney (coauthor, Learning Outside the Lines), riding a short bus represented his embarrassment and anger at being different because of dyslexia and ADHD. Growing up, he tried to hide behind a normal facade, but after graduating from Brown University with honors and "harbor[ing] aspirations of becoming an after-school special," he made a conscious decision to get back on the short bus: he outfitted one for a four-month, cross-country trip in which he visited others labeled "different," including Cookie, a six-foot-five cross-dressing Maine artist who was diagnosed as mentally retarded as a child, and Jeff, founder of a monthly group of mathematicians from the University of California at Davis. In the course of his adventures, Mooney explores our society's definition of normal and why we are determined to "fix" those who are deemed different. In the tradition of other on-the-road sagas, this is angry, funny, and bittersweet, although somewhat in need of tightening. The Short Bus should provoke many discussions and is recommended for public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/07.]-Elizabeth Safford, Nevins Memorial Lib., Methuen, MA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Adult/High School-Many kids with physical, mental, and learning disabilities have ridden the "short bus" to special-education classes, signaling that they were different, singled out, not "normal." Mooney was one of those short bus children who hated school because he was dyslexic and couldn't read until he was 12. In 2003, a few years after he graduated from Brown University, he cowrote a book on learning disabilities and began a career of public speaking on the subject. Then he set out on a journey. He bought an old short bus and traveled from Los Angeles to Maine to Washington and back to L.A., stopping to visit with various people who were also not "normal." Along the way, he confronted his own preconceptions and assumptions about people with autism, Down syndrome, deafness and blindness, ADHD, and other so-called disabilities. In this book, he deals with the question of "What is normal?" This is a story about a young man coming to accept himself, but also a cautionary tale about what happens in schools, in the workplace, and in society when people fail to recognize that everyone is normal, just in different ways. Mooney is an engaging writer with a sense of humor about his own failings, and his story is an entertaining and enlightening one.-Sarah Flowers, Santa Clara County Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

An advocate for the rights of people with learning, physical or emotional disabilities takes a road trip in the vehicle that symbolizes the way we segregate those who are different. Labeled as learning disabled in the third grade (he had attention deficit disorder and dyslexia), Mooney grew up riding the "short school bus...once used to take kids with disabilities to special ed programs." He was a special-ed success story: Though unable to read until age12, he later graduated with honors in English from Brown University. But he didn't want to be seen as someone who had "overcome" his disability and become "normal"; he traveled cross-country in one of those little yellow buses to declare his solidarity with members of the minority who ride in them and to offer some lessons for the rest of us. Learning disabled Brent lobbed paintballs at him in Albuquerque; deaf-blind Ashley cussed him out in sign language in Richmond. He met Cookie, a big guy who wore a blonde wig and a pink robe; sweet Katie, who had Down syndrome; bipolar Sara; and Asperger Jeff. All, Mooney insists, are singular people--though every one of them addresses him as "dude" and uses "man" as a form of conversational punctuation. (They're also all given, at least in his account, to pronouncing wise aphorisms they're unable to clarify.) As well as describing trips to Graceland and Burning Man, Mooney provides some social history of the efforts through eugenics and pseudoscience to "fix" or to set apart people who may be different. No one is precisely normal, he reminds us; that's a statistical concept and a social construct. The author speaks on these issues across the country, and his text occasionally sounds like a lecture. Nonetheless, this offers a heartfelt rebuke to rigid definitions of normality. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.