A little boy stops on a slide and sings, oblivious to the queue snapping behind him. In a hardware store, he plonks himself on a display toilet before crowds of shoppers and wees. He thumps crying babies. Joe is ten and mentally disabled. He lives in a hubble of misunderstanding and occasional calamity. He's funny, fascinating, maddening.<BR>This book tells Joe's story, but it also argues something audacious: that until you know Joe's life, you can't fully understand your own: that his misadventures teach us 'nothing less than the people-ness of people'.<BR>Through his strangeness, Joe makes normality luminous: how we make sense of others, what we mean by guilt and innocence, how we perceive our surroundings. All of which invites an outrageous question: for if Joe sets everyday humanity in such sharp relief, how is he still part of it? The author who asks is Joe's father. Here is the answer.