David Goode's A World without Words is an engrossing and often moving account of severely disabled children. The heart of the book presents some original and insightful descriptions of the daily lives and communicative abilities of two children with severe cases of Rubella syndrome, a debilitating disorder resulting from a pre-natal viral infection that leaves many of its victims blind, deaf, and severely retarded. Goode frames the book as an ethnomethodological study that critically engages more familiar clinical and social scientific approaches. There are a number of different ways to do ethnomethodology, and Goode's option is to develop an intensive ethnography of the lifeworlds of specific deaf, blind, and retarded children. One of the distinctive features of Goode's ethnography is its passionate advocacy. Much of his book is devoted to defending the essential humanity of the Rubella children against the indifference of their professional custodians and medical analysts. Such advocacy is by no means unusual in the social science and social service literatures, but it is not easily reconciled with the policy of "ethnomethodological indifference." Goode (1994, p. 122) sees no contradiction on this point, as he says that "indifference" in this context does not imply that one must be uncaring or neutral about the persons and situations studied. He adds that ethnomethodology's research policies should not shackle one's ability to select among various extant accounts, to support some and criticize others on local, pragmatic grounds. While this may be so, I think it may be worth looking further into the matter. When Garfinkel and Sacks introduced the idea of ethnomethodological indifference, some of their language suggested a strong version of value-free sociology that would endeavor "to describe members' accounts of formal structures wherever and by whomever they are done, while abstaining from all judgments of their adequacy, value, importance, necessity, practicality, suc? cess, or consequentially." They make clear, however, that the "indifference" they recommend pertains "to the whole of practical sociological reasoning" (Garfinkel and Sacks, 1970, p. 345). Far from being an effort to set up a dis? interested social science, the policy assigns epistemic privilege to no single version of social affairs, including sociology's own professionally authorized