A well-written and reassuring set of true stories about autism.
This debut collection of personal essays examines the experience of parenting an autistic child.
Hornok has an autistic daughter and is on the board of the National Autism Association of North Texas. “Autism can be a lonely journey,” she writes, but knowing that other families have been through the same thing can be comforting. To that end, she interviewed 30 parents of children with autism, based everywhere from Missouri to Singapore. On the basis of those interviews, she has rendered their accounts as intimate, first-person narratives. (One of the essays, about Kirk Smith’s son JJ, includes excerpts from Smith’s 2013 memoir, Rice Krispies with Ketchup.) Each piece is concise, thought-provoking, and illustrated with at least one black-and-white family photograph. The children range from highly functional to virtually nonverbal, though there are some similarities in their progress. A recurring pattern in the parents’ recollections is that their children seemed to develop normally until the age of about 1 1/2, at which point there was a regression in motion and language, and repetitive behaviors began. A common theme in this vibrant collection—which features a foreword by Temple Grandin—is meticulous planning to avoid meltdowns. But these parents are honest about their nightmare moments. A Swedish mother and her son were asked to leave a plane when he wouldn’t stop screaming; an Idaho woman had to call the police when her son started hitting her. There were also drowning scares and a threat of shock therapy. The disparity in treatment options—not just between countries, but between U.S. states—is eye-opening. Most of the parents featured have taken matters into their own hands, starting charitable organizations or support groups to plug the gaps in government services. For instance, an Ethiopian mother built a school for kids with autism so parents wouldn’t leave them tied to beds, and a Boston mother lobbied states to require insurance companies to cover autism treatment. A Russian father concludes, “Kids with autism are given to us for a reason: they are our greatest teachers.” This book offers both lessons and hope.
A well-written and reassuring set of true stories about autism.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61254-273-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Brown Books Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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