A well-researched survey of autism that will spark debates among autistic people and their allies.
In his first book, a journalist on the autism spectrum combines memoir and a wide-ranging critique of how America is failing autistic children and adults.
Noting that autism advocacy has become a minefield of conflicting views, Garcia plunges into the fray with two broad but blunt messages for the families and friends of people with autism. First, “stop trying to cure autistic people and instead help autistic people live fulfilling lives.” Second, include autistic adults in policymaking decisions that affect them. Drawing on his experiences as a millennial third-generation American of Mexican ancestry and on sources ranging from the TV show The Good Doctor to journals like Molecular Autism, Garcia explains why he believes attitudes or policies must improve in seven areas of society that are rife with myths or misimpressions: work, housing, education, health care, relationships, gender, and race. At times, the author overgeneralizes and repeats or appears to contradict himself: He faults the media’s “single-minded focus on autistic men” but says that for years Temple Grandin “was perhaps the most famous autistic woman in the world” and that today, Greta Thunberg is “perhaps the most famous autistic person in the world.” But the media have given both women far more attention than most autistic men. Nonetheless, Garcia makes solid points when he recalls his personal challenges with dating and work or demystifies government programs, such as Medicaid’s Home- and Community-based Services waivers (which has such a heavy backlog of applicants that in New Mexico, people have waited 13 years to enroll). The author also chronicles his interviews with experts such as Julia Bascom, executive director of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, and autistic adults who are Black, LGBTQ+, and married and single. Although he documents his sources clearly, there are sure to be readers who disagree with some of his arguments. Given that the issue is such a “battleground,” that’s to be expected.
A well-researched survey of autism that will spark debates among autistic people and their allies.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-328-58784-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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