Book Review
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.Neurotribes
The Legacy of Autism by Steve Silberman
With a foreword by Oliver Sacks
This book, which I finished last night, tracks the recorded incidence of autism. It begins with Henry Cavendish, born in England into a wealthy aristocratic family in 1730. His father, far from locking him away in a madhouse, as probably happened to less wealthy and fortunate autistics at the time, fostered his son’s interests. Socially inept, scientifically brilliant, Cavendish’s work went on to form the earliest foundations of many current technological achievements of today.
Making prolific use of case studies, histories, records, letters, etc the author traces the recognition of autism through the earliest occurrences to pre-Nazi Germany, the horrors of 1930’s Nazi Germany and the German psychiatrist Aspberger who first began to recognise the clusters of behaviours which define autism.
The story goes on with German psychiatrists in the USA who fled Nazi Germany and tried to define and cure autism, through the painful and sometimes horrific experiences of the children at the centre of the storm and their parents, who were looking for help and support, and were blamed for the condition of their children. Mothers were labelled ‘refrigerator mothers’, on very little evidence, and blamed for being cold towards their children and causing autistic symptoms.
The book begins and ends with the recent proliferation of autism in Silicon Valley where autistic people, often born to parents with similar traits, are fuelling the explosion of knowledge and innovation which drives today’s rapidly expanding technologies.
Towards the end the reader, this reader, is reeling from a plethora of acronyms, ASAN. NYU (an easy one), ADAPT, ASA and so on, and from trying to fit all the chronology together as the author flits back and forth with names, dates, case histories, theories, conflicts and quotes, and waiting for the big revelation….what’s happening now?
What is happening now? You’ll have to read the book. To the end! It has 519 pages of densely packed information but it is worth the effort if you want to know what’s going on beyond the labels of autism and Aspberger’s. It is more hopeful than you could imagine whilst reading the beginning and the middle of the book, but there is a kind of happy ending, and it is heart-warming – and a bit scary.
As I read,I fell into the trap which everyone falls into when they read a medical dictionary. I began to think that one or two of the people I know are autistic; I revised that to nearly all of them, to some extent; finally I concluded that I am a bit as well. How reading expands the mind!
.Neurotribes
The Legacy of Autism by Steve Silberman
With a foreword by Oliver Sacks
This book, which I finished last night, tracks the recorded incidence of autism. It begins with Henry Cavendish, born in England into a wealthy aristocratic family in 1730. His father, far from locking him away in a madhouse, as probably happened to less wealthy and fortunate autistics at the time, fostered his son’s interests. Socially inept, scientifically brilliant, Cavendish’s work went on to form the earliest foundations of many current technological achievements of today.
Making prolific use of case studies, histories, records, letters, etc the author traces the recognition of autism through the earliest occurrences to pre-Nazi Germany, the horrors of 1930’s Nazi Germany and the German psychiatrist Aspberger who first began to recognise the clusters of behaviours which define autism.
The story goes on with German psychiatrists in the USA who fled Nazi Germany and tried to define and cure autism, through the painful and sometimes horrific experiences of the children at the centre of the storm and their parents, who were looking for help and support, and were blamed for the condition of their children. Mothers were labelled ‘refrigerator mothers’, on very little evidence, and blamed for being cold towards their children and causing autistic symptoms.
The book begins and ends with the recent proliferation of autism in Silicon Valley where autistic people, often born to parents with similar traits, are fuelling the explosion of knowledge and innovation which drives today’s rapidly expanding technologies.
Towards the end the reader, this reader, is reeling from a plethora of acronyms, ASAN. NYU (an easy one), ADAPT, ASA and so on, and from trying to fit all the chronology together as the author flits back and forth with names, dates, case histories, theories, conflicts and quotes, and waiting for the big revelation….what’s happening now?
What is happening now? You’ll have to read the book. To the end! It has 519 pages of densely packed information but it is worth the effort if you want to know what’s going on beyond the labels of autism and Aspberger’s. It is more hopeful than you could imagine whilst reading the beginning and the middle of the book, but there is a kind of happy ending, and it is heart-warming – and a bit scary.
As I read,I fell into the trap which everyone falls into when they read a medical dictionary. I began to think that one or two of the people I know are autistic; I revised that to nearly all of them, to some extent; finally I concluded that I am a bit as well. How reading expands the mind!
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