People with Intellectual Disabilities: Towards a Good Life? Kelly Johnson and Jan Walmsley with Marie Wolfe Policy Press, University of Bristol, Bristol. 2010. 204 pp., £24.99. ISBN 978-1-84742-068-8.

Born of justifiable frustration with current policy and a desire to initiate a wave of new thinking, Kelly Johnson and JanWalmsley consider the ‘good life’ and what it might be for men and women with an intellectual disability (ID). This book, divided into three parts, each comprising three chapters, begins with MarieWolfe, a woman with a learning disability, reflecting on her life (Chapter 1). Her reflections that encompass her involvement in the advocacy movement, living both independently and in group homes, and her hopes and aspirations for the future are followed (Chapter 2) by a discussion of the ‘good life’. Here the authors, through a wide ranging collection ofWestern minds, search for new ideas and report upon their attempts to ascertain what the ‘good life’ might comprise. Their findings, although far from definitive, point to the enduring significance of reason, along with the importance of both freedoms and duties.While clearly uncomfortable with defining the ‘good life’, the authors reel off the usual obstacles to achieving it: oppression, absence of physical safety, a failure of recognition and, tellingly for our society, narrowly defined and imposed definitions of happiness that rely upon the accumulation of positional goods. Armed with this and Marie’s description of her life, Johnson and Walmsley reflect directly on the ‘good life’ for men and women with IDs (Chapter 3)…..

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This book will be of particular interest to those readers schooled in the aspirations of Valuing People, and the social model who are unsettled by how little has been achieved over the past 30 years. Readers of this persuasion will gain from the authors’ thoughtful interrogation of contemporary orthodoxies. Other readers, like myself, who are of a more sceptical bent, might be disappointed with the book’s central message as it is not a novel one (Vanier 2003; Reinders 2008). That said, there is a fascinating discussion of stigma and labelling, and a careful reading of the book will be rewarded by its many thought-proving insights into disability policy and scholarship. People with Intellectual Disabilities:

Towards a Good Life? is one of a number of recent books (Shakespeare 2006; Thomas 2007; Goodley

2011) concerned to promote the interests of disabled people while questioning accepted verities, and as such it is required reading.

Marcus Redley

The Cambridge Intellectual & Development Disabilities

Research Group, University of Cambridge.

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