Tim Shriver of Special Olympics tells how the people the world overlooks taught him what a full life is.
Shriver says he first learned it from his aunt Rosemary: his mother started Camp Shriver to find out what children with disabilities could do, not what they could not.
Shriver calls it the 'school of the heart': athletes and friends with intellectual disabilities taught him more than presidents, scholars, or fame ever did.
The book's central claim: needing help never lowers a person's worth, because vulnerability and value live together in every one of us.
Raised in one of America's most powerful families, Shriver learned early that power and celebrity were not enough to satisfy - meaning came from service and love.
At the first Special Olympics, a runner close to the finish line stopped, turned around, and ran back to comfort a fallen friend. 'Who won that race?' Shriver asks.
The rest of this summary — and the one thing to do this week — is in the PDF.
Download the free PDFTimothy Shriver - son of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who founded Special Olympics, and Sargent Shriver, the first Peace Corps director - became chairman of Special Olympics himself. His memoir makes a surprising claim: his greatest teachers were not presidents or scholars, but people with intellectual disabilities, the world's most forgotten minority.
The story starts in his own family. His aunt Rosemary Kennedy had an intellectual disability in an era of eugenics and institutions. After a disastrous lobotomy arranged by her father, Rosemary was sent away to Wisconsin; he never visited her again, and her siblings did not see her for twenty years. Shriver tells this honestly - the secrecy, the shame, and the denial that shadowed a famous family.
