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
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
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
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