An authentic, engaging, and informative look at an autistic woman’s inner world.
An autistic woman explains how her condition shapes her world in Kotowicz’s nonfiction debut.
The author blends autobiography and health reporting as she describes her own experience with autism and offers a perspective on how neurotypical people can best interact with, support, and love the autistic people in their lives. Kotowicz, who received her diagnosis as an adult, explains how she came to understand that she experienced sensations, processed thoughts, and managed her physical and emotional needs differently from the nonautistic people around her. The book addresses theories of autism, common misunderstandings of autistic behavior, and strategies for both autistic and neurotypical people to use to improve their interactions. The concluding chapter is optimistic, focusing on the ways in which the author has embraced her neurological differences, framing them as core aspects of her identity rather than problems to be fixed. Although the chapter subtitles (“How I Take It All In,” “How I Reach a Tipping Point,” “How My Heart Is Healing”) make it clear that Kotowicz’s individual experience forms this well-told and compelling narrative’s core, she describes situations and experiences that are common among people with autism. The book’s dual nature, functioning as both personal history and informational guide, works well, universalizing an individual story while also focusing on the unique details. The author does an excellent job of discussing autism without pathologizing it. Kotowicz is particularly skilled at breaking down her experiences into their fundamental elements and discussing underlying causes, as when she explains that she was able to manage a sensitivity to rain by understanding that, although raindrops caused her no harm, the pain they produced was a valid feeling that she could only process once she acknowledged its existence. The book makes a solid case for developing a global sense of empathy: “Be mindful that someone’s internal state may be different than you expect, and different than you’d feel if you were acting like them.”
An authentic, engaging, and informative look at an autistic woman’s inner world.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2022
ISBN: 9798986482729
Page Count: 118
Publisher: Neurobeautiful
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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