Beautiful Lives: How We Got Learning Disabilities So Wrong: The startling and rarely told history of learning disabilities
Stephen Unwin
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'This book is both heart-rending and gorgeous. It crosses the line many times but ultimately, it's about love. He teaches us humanity.' MIRIAM MARGOLYES
'Thank you, Joey, for getting your dad off his arse to write this book.' HUGH BONNEVILLE
'A beautiful book - powerful, persuasive, illuminating, moving.' GYLES BRANDRETH
'This is a wonderful and important book. Beautifully written, of course; but full of pain and joy, concern and celebration.' SIMON RUSSELL BEALE
'A powerful, multi-faceted, myth-busting account of the most marginalised and belittled out-group in modern society.' SIMON JARRETT, author of Those They Called Idiots
For much of history, people with learning disabilities have been regarded as unworthy of interest - often seen as a threat to the social order and sometimes dismissed as barely human. While recent years have seen an improvement, learning-disabled people are still treated as fundamentally different.
Beautiful Lives is a personal and pragmatic account, told through the eyes of a father whose son has severe learning disabilities. From early civilisation to the chilling realities of twentieth-century eugenics, this powerful book uncovers a startling and rarely told history - one deeply embedded in the challenges still faced today.
Unwin shapes this history into a powerful story of love, lived experience and the long struggle for a better future.
Read MorePraise for Beautiful Lives
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A beautiful book - powerful, persuasive, illuminating, moving.Unwin's marvellous, elegant, moving book is a major contribution to both the history and understanding of this thing we call learning disability . . . it is a powerful, multi-faceted, myth-busting account of the most marginalised and belittled group in modern society.This book is both heartrending and gorgeous. It crosses the line many times but ultimately it's about love. He teaches us humanity.This is a superbly written, even entertaining treatment of a sombre topic - how people with learning disabilities are marginalised and ignored. I could not recommend it more highly.A profoundly affecting book that also provides a manifesto for the future. No reader will be left unchallenged by this incredible and important book. No reader will be left untouched.This is a must-read for anyone wanting to develop a deeper, more humanistic understanding of this area.With an astonishing breadth of research and a profoundly personal narrative, Stephen Unwin's book on society's treatment of those living with learning disabilities is revealing, wise, angry and hopeful. Thank you, Joey, for getting your dad off his arse to write this book. This is a wonderful and important book. Beautifully written, of course; but full of pain and joy, concern and celebration.
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