"Why would anyone adopt a badly abused, non-speaking, 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 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, the book illuminates the belated emergence of a self in language. Participants can look forward to a lively discussion of the nature of family, the importance of social obligation, and the meaning of neurological difference.

Author of the forthcoming Reasonable People: A Memoir of Family (Other Press 2007), Ralph James Savarese, assistant professor of English, teaches American literature and creative writing. A chapter from his memoir was selected as a "notable essay" in the Best American Essays series of 2004, and he is last year's winner of the Hennig Cohen Prize for an "outstanding contribution to Melville scholarship" from the Herman Melville Society.