Parents of children with autism will find gentle, helpful guidance in these pages.
A memoir of autism in which a young woman finds her voice after being unable to effectively communicate until her mid-20s.
“For the past 25 years I have been trapped inside a body without a voice.” So writes Grodin, who is able to do so after learning to type with a communication device. Gilpeer, her mother and co-narrator, opens with a fraught incident in which Grodin had been enrolled in special courses at UCLA but had an altercation with a caregiver that required police intervention. “We made it through this incident, but what about tomorrow?” she writes. “We needed to plot a course forward for her, establish how she’d make her way in this world when [her father] and I would not be present as her mediators.” Moving back and forth across time, Gilpeer recounts how she and her husband became aware of Grodin’s emerging condition, which involves a series of “issues with the central nervous system, and the best way to diagnose and characterize the condition was through noting disturbances with motor functioning—impairment to speech, social interaction, and eye contact.” A dominant emotion in the autistic person is fear born of frustration; for parents, chronic anxiety reigns. Both authors write in detail of the “stims,” or “self-stimulatory behaviors,” that autistic people exhibit, including rocking, spinning, or making unusual noises. Sometimes, this behavior frightens those who do not understand that, as Grodin relates, these are the only avenues of communication available to the autistic person. “Rocking is like my security blanket,” she writes, whereas hitting herself in the head is “me wanting to hurt myself for not being normal.” Now that another path of communication has opened, Grodin expresses her dedication to achieving certain goals: among them, starting an exercise routine, learning about her Jewish heritage, and going on a date.
Parents of children with autism will find gentle, helpful guidance in these pages.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-298434-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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
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