Between the Normal and the Broken: My Encounters with Jean Vanier’’s Radical Humanity

By the author of the multiple award-winning The Boy in the Moon, and Sixty, comes the story of a father searching for a home for his disabled son, and his conversations with Jean Vanier, one of our great moral thinkers, about the value of every human and where each of us can find our place.

In 2008, Ian Brown began a correspondence with Canadian philosopher and humanitarian Jean Vanier, in which Ian asked him questions such as ＂What is our human value?＂ ＂Are you afraid of death?＂ and ＂How have you managed the crises in your own faith?＂ Jean Vanier wrote back with unfailing humility, patience and acceptance, to Ian, who was searching for answers about where his profoundly disabled son, Walker, fit in the world.

This is a book for both secular readers and spiritual seekers; for people who are looking for deeper meaning, if not happiness, and ways to make sense of the world. Both Ian Brown and Jean Vanier show us how we might take risks to move beyond our comfort zones and place ourselves among other humans who are conventionally judged as ＂weaker＂ than the rest of us, and what they and we can gain by an even playing field between the ＂normal＂ and the ＂broken.＂

IAN BROWN is an author and a feature writer for the Globe and Mail whose work has won many National Magazine and National Newspaper awards. His most recent book, The Boy in the Moon: A Father’s Search for His Disabled Son, was a national bestseller and a New York Times and Globe and Mail Best Book. It was also the winner of the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and the Trillium Book Award. His previous books include Freewheeling, which won the National Business Book Award, and the provocative examination of modern masculinity, Man Overboard. He lives in Toronto.