5 Autism Books
February 19, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
The February 18th USA Today has a round-up of short review of 5 new autism books. Here are excerpts from the USA Today article and links to some of my own posts on these books.
“Hands down, Unstrange Minds is the most useful book of the bunch for anyone who is interested in learning more about autism. ……… [Grinker] skillfully combines his daughter Isabel’s story with an accessible historical and cultural examination of how people with autism have been diagnosed and treated in the USA and around the world.”
Autism Vox: Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism by Roy Richard Grinker; What else can we talk about if there’s no autism epidemic?
“English writer Moore puts her unusual family under a microscope in this moving book. Her two oldest sons, George and Sam, are autistic; her youngest is not. As exhausting and difficult as this situation is for Moore, it makes for a book that is extremely helpful in conveying the enormous differences in how autism affects children.”
Autism Vox: What I Learned From Reading Charlotte Moore’s George and Sam
“At 25, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a term applied to high-functioning people with autism. In his memoir, Tammet describes his childhood: Though school came easily, making friends was difficult. An accepting family, a sympathetic lover, the ability to work from home and the Internet have all helped Tammet.”
“A Hollywood writer and set director, [Portia] Iversen narrates how her son Dov’s autism diagnosis in 1994 galvanizes her and her husband to seek out scientists and legislators to push for more research. The memoir also details how Iversen made contact with a mother of an autistic boy in India, Soma Mukhopadhyay. Although Soma’s son Tito is autistic, he is also a gifted poet and writer.”
Autism Vox: The Changeling and the Pied Piper: Fairy Tales and Science in Strange Son
“The media spin: Two lonely, gifted, differently wired people with Asperger’s found joy together. Reality was not so simple: this joint memoir details each of their painful childhoods, their struggles to find work despite being talented (he is math savant, she is artistic), their emotional isolation, their suicide attempts, their sense of being freaks, their self-hatred, their divorce and remarriage.”
While I do not have plans to teach a course on “Autism Lit” in the near future, if I ever do, it will not be easy to make choices for the syllabus.
I’ve read Unstrange Minds and am starting to read Born on a Blue Day.
What do you think?
They didn’t list “Send in the Idiots.” Is that only because it’s not new?
I think so—-came out last year, though Moore’s book came out even before in the UK.
I started to read Strange Son but had to abandon it due to the way she portrayed her son. I wrote a review here:
http://www.epinions.com/content_331256794756
Also wanted to let you know that the link to her site has an error, looks like you added an e to the end of son.