A powerful and heartfelt “slice of life” tale.
How Apple’s Siri made a life-altering difference for an autistic boy.
Expanded from a viral New York Times op-ed column she penned in 2014, this new book by Allure contributing editor Newman (You Make Me Feel Like an Unnatural Woman: Diary of a New (Older) Woman, 2004, etc.) compiles bittersweet anecdotes about her son Gus’ bond with the Apple app Siri. “Autism does not entirely define my son, but it informs so much about him and our life together,” writes the author, who birthed twin sons Gus and Henry prematurely. Writing with wit, humor, and effervescent honesty, Newman charts her history with twin sons who became distinctly different even prior to their first birthdays. Gus began exhibiting a marked lack of interest in his surroundings, eating only one food type at a time, and notable developmental and communicative delays. When he was diagnosed at age 6 as being on the autistic spectrum, Newman asked herself why and attempted to find and place causative blame. As Gus matured, she was continually heartbroken by the cruelty of children and even ill-mannered adults, yet she was also empowered to make a difference in her son’s life by observing, learning, and making his experience as close to happiness as she could. Among the many challenges were Gus’ growth impediments and numerous doctor appointments where she felt judged. The author also shares stories of how Henry grew up as the doting brother who always loved Gus yet often became exasperated. Early on, Gus had an affinity for music and singing, and Newman writes gleefully of his development of a “relationship” with Siri. This odd yet endearing pairing comprises the book’s rewarding and adorable closing third, a funny, warmhearted narrative of wry wisdom derived from the foibles of both Gus and Henry and powered by a maternal love that autism could never compromise. “In a world where the commonly held wisdom is that technology isolates us,” writes the author, “it’s worth considering another side of the story.”
A powerful and heartfelt “slice of life” tale.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-241362-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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