LAUSR

children with autism. The second movement explores the way we perceive, ‘think’, conceive of education and its ‘natural’ limits and divisions, and thus who is worth schooling, in effect who counts as human and who does not. The third is about the logic of sensitivity through which ableism speaks to disability, that is the language and perspectives of ‘care’ through which the tragedy of disability is located within individuals made visible and vulnerable by their ‘special needs’. This sensitivity often displaces the real need for strategies and changes in practice to normalise inclusion and highlight latent ableism. Indeed such sensitivity informs the constant reiteration of division, exclusion and special education in new forms with new names and aged-old justifications. ‘If it quacks like a duck ...’ (as Slee says p. 74). Slee does not want to walk away from inclusive education, not yet (p. 81). He sees glimmers of something different and places where inclusion really works but sets this alongside the despair and anger of many parents of children with disabilities who just want the children to be properly educated with others in their local school. There is none of what the late Geoff Whitty called naïve posibbilitarianism here but rather a set of challenges to policymakers, practitioners and activists to do better, to fail better. This is a personal, funny, touching, scathing, discomforting, infuriating, different and necessary book. Slee’s grasp of the global state of inclusive education is second to none. He lives and breathes the struggle for inclusion. His ability to make everyday assumptions into strange perversions is stunning. The book is academic and scholarly and not, at the same time.What I mean is that it bears its scholarship lightly making it accessible to audiences of many different sorts. It is a short book, full of creative and impertinent thinking and powerful often irascible insights. It addresses the absurdity of exclusion in its own terms.