A well-presented, valuable resource for parents and educators.
This guide presents a framework for how young people on the autism spectrum can develop a sense of self and become fully integrated into society.
Cathy Dodge Smith (Autism Spectrum Disorder and Traumatic Incident Reduction, 2015), the founding president of the Davis Dyslexia and Autism Facilitators’ Association of Canada, has an autistic son and grandson. Ronald D. Davis, who struggled with dyslexia and autism into adulthood, drew on his experiences to develop the Davis Autism Approach Program in 2008. People with autism have problems with social relationships, communication skills, and repetitive behaviors, the author writes. They also perceive everyday phenomena as “Unusual Sensory Experiences,” as when a vacuum cleaner provokes a panic reaction. The Davis Autism Approach, led by a licensed facilitator, is conducted in one-week blocks and in three basic stages. First, patients must become oriented and stable—able to follow directions and learn through the senses. For the severely impaired, Davis prescribes a natural orientation inducing tool, which emits a regular “ting” sound to promote focus. A second step is identity development, fueled by the theories of Erik Erikson and Jean Piaget and focused on helping patients understand emotions, desires, and responsibilities. The program relies heavily on clever clay models that represent the self and others and their interactions to explain abstract concepts like cause and effect. The final step is social integration, which helps patients with listening, taking turns, and discerning what behavior is appropriate in different contexts. In this user-friendly guide, the author explains these steps and strategies in lucid prose, including plenty of case studies that show the approach in action. Her own son, Desmond Smith, who has autism and is now a Davis facilitator, recounts how he learned to adjust to life’s changes. The photographs of the clay models that he and Kelly shot make it easier for readers to picture how Davis’ ideas might be put into practice, and a final section of further case studies from patients and their parents is ample testimony to the program’s success. The key, the author believes, is that this system doesn’t command specific behaviors; instead, it teaches the reasoning behind them.
A well-presented, valuable resource for parents and educators.Pub Date: May 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5255-1695-5
Page Count: 222
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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