Help to understand child adoption through Aristotle’s experience. In Adopted Like Me: My Book of Adopted Heroes (Barnes & Noble 2013), the author Ann Angel and illustrator Marc Thomas offer accounts of the high-achieving lives of a selection of individuals who experienced adoption. The book is intended to encourage children who have suffered the trauma of losing or being removed from their biological parents and transferred to a different family.

The adoptees chosen include Moses, John Lennon, Marilyn Mandela, Steve Jobs, Fatima Whitbread, Edgar Allan Poe, J.R.R. Tolkein, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Langston Hughes. Aristotle was indeed adopted after he was orphaned, being taken in by his older sister Arimneste and her husband Philoxenus. The narrative emphasises how his adoptive parents realised his intellectual excellence and ensured that he received the most appropriate education by enrolling him at Plato’s Academy.