Joe

The Only Boy in the World

Michael Blastland

ISBN 1861979614

January 2006

Price £12.99

Hardback, 256 pp.

Buy this book at amazon.co.uk

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Subject: Memoir

Other formats available: Paperback

An exceptionally haunting memoir that also shows us what it is to be really human.

A little boy sits at the top of the slide, oblivious to the restless queue snapping behind him. He stares into space… and sings. In a hardware store, he plonks himself on a display toilet amidst the throng of customers and wees, wearing little more than a serene smile. He thumps crying babies. He is amazed when the car he runs in front of actually hits him. Joe is ten and mentally disabled. He exists in a lonely bubble of misunderstanding and occasional calamity. He’s funny, fascinating, maddening. He has strange, unexpected talents. This book tells his moving story, but it also argues something more, something brazen, preposterous even: that Joe is a profound lesson in our own humanity, and that until we get to know his unusual, eventful life, we can’t fully understand our own.

Drawing on philosophy, developmental psychology, evolutionary theory, literature and medical research, this thought-provoking inquiry shows how we, in contrast to Joe, are equipped to negotiate life. The Only Boy in the World, by his oddity and isolation, makes luminous so much that we take for granted: how we are instinctive mind-readers, how we perceive the physical world around us, how we make sense of other people, how we understand guilt and innocence.

Running throughout is an unsettling question: if Joe sets our humanity in such sharp relief, can we still say that he is part of it? If he shows by what he lacks all that is most remarkable in us, is he still one of us? The author who asks that outrageous question is Joe’s father. In confronting it, the Only Boy in the World finally suggests an answer to what truly makes us human.

‘Deeply personal and moving … [Blastland’s] beautifully written book offers us a glimpse of the torments endured by the growing number of children born with their cerebral pathways wrongly wired.’
— Val Hennessy, Daily Mail

‘Joe, the Only Boy in the World is an affecting book. Blastland invokes the ancient African saying that “it takes a whole village to raise a child” and, with this book, he has widened the village to include potentially every reader.’
— Jaqueline Burton, Sunday Business Post