The inspiring story of a courageous, dedicated and most unusual woman.
An extraordinary view into the workings of an autistic mind. Grandin, a professor of animal behavior (Colorado State Univ.) and a world-renowned designer of livestock equipment, attributes her creativity, technical skills and understanding of animals to the autism that has set her apart from most of human society.
Unlike the rest of us, Grandin does not think in words. As she describes it, she has an ever-growing videotape library in her head, which she can manipulate like a computer program, retrieving images from memory, altering them, rotating them, combining them. So different is she that she has always felt like an outside observer, comparing herself to "an anthropologist on Mars'' (the phrase became the title of Oliver Sacks's recent book, in which he profiled Grandin; Sacks contributes a foreword to this volume). Lacking social intuition and bemused by the emotional range of others, she relies on logic and an elaborate set of rules to guide her behavior. While other humans may be a puzzlement, Grandin has a remarkable empathy for animals, especially cows (the original title for this book was A Cow's Eye View). It was her observation of cattle's reactions in squeeze chutes that led her to design a squeeze machine for herself that she uses daily to calm her anxieties. Besides revealing her own survival techniques, Grandin tries to explain the many subtypes of autism and the various drugs—antidepressants, anticonvulsants, corticosteroids, etc.—that have been used to treat the disorder. Her flat, almost mechanical writing style makes these sections somewhat tedious, but the information in them will be of considerable interest to parents of autistic children. For the general reader, her revelations about herself- -growing up, meeting the right teachers, and finding the right career niche—and her insights into animals are what make this account so fascinating. Includes a resource list on autism.
The inspiring story of a courageous, dedicated and most unusual woman.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-47792-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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