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Summary: An Unforgettable Bus Ride
Review: This book offers a glimpse into a world many don't know anything about even though it exists alongside their own--the world of people with developmental disabilities and their families. By turns curious, frustrated, supportive, and confused, Rachel Simon gives the reader a masterful account of loving, hating, being amazed by, and being surprised by her sister. Beth is a woman with mental retardation and an indomitable drive to do as she pleases when she pleases with her life despite her disabilities. Rachel sketches Beth's world--with and without Rachel--and how it affects her own life and world in a poetic yet grittily honest manner. Read this book. Read it more than once.
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Summary: wonderful read......a book worth the money
Review: this book teaches a great deal about self-determination in everyone's lives it is one of the best memoirs I ever read in my 12 years of living ~Rachel touches our hearts with the true words of her life with what she once overcame with her sister Beth~ She teaches and learns herself to be more open in the world around her as I did learn to ~This is one book you should neve regret reading, as I did once but came to enjoy it~ Through her book you reach the sad ends where it makes you cry, the happy ends where it makes you smile and the funny ends where it makes you laugh...this book touched my heart dearly~
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Summary: A great book club book
Review: This is an amazing book. What appears at first to be a deceptively simple book about the day to day life of a woman with mental retardation turns out to also contain an astonishing family memoir. Simon could have written a riveting book about her own youth, or her mother's struggle with depression and domestic violence, but instead manages to tell those stories in brief asides without ever taking the book's focus from her sister. Simon, and her sister, have a lot to teach us about mental retardation, self-determination, and the satisfaction work does, or does not, bring to our lives. Highly recommended.
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Summary: Unflinchingly honest
Review: This is, quite simply, a splendid earthbound book. With admirable honesty Rachel Simon details her year spent riding the buses of an unnamed Pennsylvania city with her "mentally challenged" younger sister Beth.Unsentimental, clear-eyed, and painfully truthful, Simon interweaves scenes from the family's past into the tales of her travels with the self-named Cool Beth. We meet a series of quite remarkable drivers, some of whom display levels of wisdom and kindness that are exceptional; as well, the majority of the drivers possess philosophical attitudes and good-heartedness. It's a view from that front bench seat by the door that will undoubtedly alter every reader's perception and/or preconceived notions about the people who carry us from one point to another--in any city or town. Everyone in this book is revealed, warts and all, with perception and, by the end, with a hard-won perspective that leads not only to the author's self-acceptance but also to a new level of respect for the wonderfully well-depicted Beth (in all her rotund, stubborn glory); for the parents and siblings who spent decades of their lives striving not only to be supportive of their sister but also their efforts to come to terms with the effects of Beth on their own lives. This is a brave and enlightening book that leaves one filled with admiration for both Rachel and Beth, along with a heightened sense of how, so often, while we might think we're coping well with whatever life throws at us, below the surface linger effects of which we may well be unaware.
Most highly recommended.
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Summary: Preachy and over-sweet, but honest
Review: Well, hmmm...I really love the IDEA of this book. Rachel Simon, the author, spent a year with her mentally challenged sister, who spends her days riding the city buses. However, the actual book was REALLY preachy at times, I felt. The author spends much of the book being critical of herself and how she is living her own life, but I often felt that I was supposed to be bettering myself too. So, that got annoying. Still, there are moments that are very sweet, sometimes too much sugary-ness, but Simon does not shy away from the ugly bits of life--I respect her for that.
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Summary: Sorry, I don't believe it
Review: While I will agree that Rachel Simon has a definite flair for prose, I have to say that I honestly could not buy into the notion that this book is a "memoir". It may be based on a real person, but if that's the case, it seems highly fictionalized. For one thing, I highly doubt that so many drivers-seat philosophers work for the same bus line (if, in fact, there are any at all). It seemed ridiculous to me that so many of these drivers were able to spout off the true meaning of life answers that elude the rest of us mere mortals. That is not to imply that bus drivers are by nature or profession uneducated or unable to think profoundly; I just found it a bit odd that so many of them had remarkably similary hard-life-but-I-found-the-light-and-that-is-why-I-have-all-the-answers points of view. It would have seemed more realistic if just one (or possibly two) thought so deeply, but I laughed this "memoir" off as fiction the second the third "wise and learned" driver showed up. Further, I found the character of Beth to be unbelievably obnoxious. I read a review in which one person claims to know who Beth is and has ridden the bus with her. If that is true (and, obviously, someone has ridden the bus with her), then I can understand her frustration with Beth being portrayed as some sort of saint. She's rude, plain and simple, and the author makes it clear that she certainly knows better. If I were on my way to work and someone, disabled or not, started causing a ruckus, I would be one of those people who said something. Heck, I would complain to the bus company. No one has the right to behave that way and it chafed me throughout this book that Beth seemed to think it was okay for her to do whatever she pleased but that it wasn't all right for others to disagree with her behavior. I found myself sympathizing mostly with those who hated having Beth on the bus. I studied special education in college before switching majors and I have a definite sympathy for and patience with disabled individuals. I do not, however, have any sympathy whatsoever for an able bodied individual who can and should be working to flat out refuse to do so. Sorry, but if I suddenly decided not to work, I wouldn't get other taxpayers' money (darn - no self-determination here) and the book makes it crystal clear that Beth is able to work but won't. A person like that is no hero - she's a drain on society and an insult to those who would love to be able to work and can't, and if Beth's social worker. There are also a few editorial errors, but nothing that made me too ready to toss the book across the room. For example, on the first page, Rachel is waking up in her sister's apartment in order to ride the bus - just this one time - for her article. When she starts her year of riding, she comments that she has never slept there overnight. Minor glitches such as that appear throughout the book. Overall a well-written, but ultimately unbelievable book.
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Summary: This could be decent...
Review: While there is nothing to be said about the book that is exactly negative or diparageing, however this book is almost pure exploitation of a subject that no one who has a public spot light can bad mouth. I however dont have that problem. This book is 10 percent at best a heartwarming story about a girl finding her retarded, no mentally handy capped sister, wait no she insists you call her "special needs." In all honesty the truth of the matter is that Rachel Simon is exploiting her sister and somewhat bragging about it. You may say that i am a pompous trash talking idiot, but i have had the displeasure of sitting through her lecture. She truly is an arrogant egotistical indecent [...]. She really wrote this book more to brag about how good a person she is, rather then to 'touch' people. She didnt even give her sister any money from the sales of the book, and she is extremely biggoted against alot of random people. At the best shes saying im such an asset to society that you can ignore my sister's freeloading, but at the worst and how i honestly felt after hearing her talk is that she is greedy and willing to exploit her sister, while getting massive arousal out of telling large groups of people how they're bad people because they dont have a retarded sister in an interracial relationship which your exploiting for your own benefit.
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