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. The author is Mark Haddon. The Italian title is "Lo strano caso del cane ucciso a mezzanotte", which is a little more informative than the English title, i.e. it says the dog was bumped off in the middle of the night. (If they had used such an explicit title in UK, Tony would have declared a People's Day of Mourning for the Dog, and Blunkett would have declared a National State of Emergency and had every dog's paw prints recorded, and lost on a computer. A Scientific Commission of Enquiry might also have been set up to discover the precise timing of the death, to report within five years). The book - a work of fiction - is related in the supposed voice of a 15- year-old boy with Asperger's syndrome, attending a school for children with special needs. (Non-disabled children therefore shout "Special Needs!" as an insult. If UK gets a bit more modern, presumably they will shout "Yah-ha Included!") The boy's own remarks about children with physical disabilities, perhaps articulating a covert public opinion, are rather contemptuous. However, he is not portrayed as an expert on PC terminology. His views might have been influenced by the fact that he does not like the smell or sight of other people's excrement, and therefore cannot use the pupils' toilet at school, which is liberally smeared with this product. The language used by adults throughout the book is of a kind that could not legally have been published in UK 40 years ago. The religious cursing may have been tidied up in the Italian version, and the film version (in progress) might, I suppose, use less of the procreational epithets for the American market. People with Asperger's who have, for years, been irritated by the Rain Man being the standard reference point, can now look forward to 30 years of being "understood" by complete strangers in terms of Christopher Boone, the supposed Asperger hero of the Curious Incident. (However, in the film he'll probably make Professor of Math at Cambridge, which he doesn't in the book). Although the book has sold well in the UK, close textual analysis has been delayed because everyone's copy has been loaned out by their partner to someone at the office whose cousin has a child who might have Asperger's. m99m ________________End of message______________________ Archives and tools for the Disability-Research Discussion List are now located at: www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/disability-research.html You can JOIN or LEAVE the list from this web page.