In the foreword, Oliver Sacks writes that this “sweeping and penetrating history…is fascinating reading” that “will change...
A well-researched, readable report on the treatment of autism that explores its history and proposes significant changes for its future.
Silberman, a writer for Wired and other publications, explores the work of Hans Asperger, a Viennese pediatrician who saw a genetic root to the disorder, and Leo Kanner, a child psychiatrist in Baltimore whose work led to the “refrigerator mother” concept promoted and exploited by Bruno Bettelheim. Woven into his accounts of the clinical work and theories of these men are a wealth of sympathetic stories of parents and their autistic children. There’s even the story of the making of Rain Man, which featured Dustin Hoffman as an autistic man. The latest version of the Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders recently redefined autism as autism spectrum disorder, a single disorder having a wide range of symptoms and severity. Asperger’s syndrome, no longer in the DSM, is generally seen to be at the mild end of the spectrum. Silberman argues for the concept of neurodiversity, the idea that this disorder—and others like dyslexia and ADHD—represents naturally occurring cognitive variations that have contributed to the evolution of human culture and technology. As the author writes, people with autistic traits “have always been part of the human community, standing apart, quietly making the world that mocks and shuns them a better place.” In the closing chapters, the author acknowledges the emergence of autistic-run organizations, the impact of the Internet in providing a natural home for the growing community of newly diagnosed teens and adults, and a growing civil rights movement that doesn’t depend on hopes for a cure but seeks to help autistic people and their families live more productive and secure lives.
In the foreword, Oliver Sacks writes that this “sweeping and penetrating history…is fascinating reading” that “will change how you think of autism.” No argument with that assessment.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-58333-467-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Avery
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
IN THE NEWS
Madness and pathos alternate in these selections from the controversial psychoanalyst's (18971957) papers, which document the scientific delusions and personal difficulties that preoccupied him from the mid-1930s through his immigration to America on the eve of WW II. Because materials remain missing, this sequel to 1988's Passion of Youth: An Autobiography, 18971922 begins in 1934. In the intervening years of 192333, Reich's studies of the function of the orgasm and of genital sexuality's effects on character found him moving from psychoanalysis toward physiology and biology. Settling in Oslo, Reich put his radical political activism on the back burner while beginning a new program of experiments to examine nothing less than the fundamental energies of life. The excerpts from his journals and letters collected here form a streamlined narrative of his struggles to gain recognition for the theories to which this work gave rise. Reich believed that his insights represented ``the greatest discovery of the century.'' Readers need not be molecular biologists, however, to be skeptical of this claim: The laboratory jottings reproduced here seem like so much hocus-pocus. Meanwhile, Reich's ravings (``the living arises from the nonliving!!'') escape the lab to infect his accounts of a disintegrating home life. He can't seem to reflect personally on sex without proclaiming, ``My theory is correct!'' His children remain alienated from him, and his lover leaves him, but Reich consoles himself with the idea that his suffering is that of a man of genius. With his 1939 ``discovery'' of orgone, Reich seems to have gone over the edge for sure: ``I yearn for a beautiful woman with no sexual anxieties who will just take me! Have inhaled too much orgone radiation.'' At this point, the deepening shadow of Nazi expansion forces the Jewish and communist Reich's emigration to a credulous New York. Reich comes across as a crank, but a human figure all the same. Ideal material for a screenplay about a 20th-century mad scientist.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-11247-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
Gray (Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, not reviewed) offers more of what he calls ``advanced relationship skills,'' a delightful term that says all that need be said about the author's hyper-instrumental, connect-the-dots approach to thinking about human relationships. Pull-quotes—perhaps indicating that not even Gray expects people to actually read the rest of the text—appear on nearly every page: ``Men must learn to use their ancient hunting skills of silently watching and waiting when listening to their mates'' or ``Fire gazing is the most ancient and potent of male stress relievers; when men today stare into the TV, they are, in effect, mindlessly looking into the fire.'' (This raises the question of whether there were beer commercials in Peking Man's first barbecue.) Gray does cover some of the same turf that Deborah Tannen does about differences between the way men and women speak and listen. And it's not all horse chips and piffle. But there comes a point when it's reasonable to ask whether all those horrid Greek myths full of rage and dismemberment and blindness weren't a better way to think about relations between the sexes than self- help books. (First printing of 500,000; first serial to Cosmopolitan; Literary Guild split main selection; $350,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017162-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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