Not Even Wrong
A Father's Journey into the Lost History of Autism
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- USD 10.99
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- USD 10.99
Descripción editorial
"Collins elucidates, with great compassion, what it means to be 'normal' and what it means to be human." -Los Angeles Times
When Paul Collins's son Morgan was two years old, he could read, spell, and perform multiplication tables in his head...but not answer to his own name. A casual conversation-or any social interaction that the rest of us take for granted-will, for Morgan, always be a cryptogram that must be painstakingly decoded. He lives in a world of his own: an autistic world.
In Not Even Wrong, Paul Collins melds a memoir of his son's autism with a journey into this realm of permanent outsiders. Examining forgotten geniuses and obscure medical archives, Collins's travels take him from an English churchyard to the Seattle labs of Microsoft, and from a Wisconsin prison cell block to the streets of Vienna. It is a story that reaches from a lonely clearing in the Black Forest into the London palace of King George I, from Defoe and Swift to the discovery of evolution; from the modern dawn of the computer revolution to, in the end, the author's own household.
Not Even Wrong is a haunting journey into the borderlands of neurology - a meditation on what "normal" is, and how human genius comes to us in strange and wondrous forms.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rare is the book that can wring more pathos out of its subject than one written by a parent about his or her disadvantaged child. In this slim, reflective memoir, the author of Sixpence House takes readers from the moment he and his wife learn their three-year-old son Morgan is autistic through the long and often agonizing attempt to simply communicate with him. Morgan is advanced, having learned the alphabet at age one. It isn't much longer before he's reading medical texts and is a computer whiz. But he refuses to communicate verbally and barely acknowledges his parents' presence. A lover of arcana, Collins refers back to what may have been the first studied case of autism, concerning the Wild Child of Hamelin, a young boy found wandering the Black Forest in 1725, who acted more animal than human and was later a celebrated oddity at the British court, inspiring everyone from Daniel Defoe to Jonathan Swift. Collins spends inordinate amounts of time investigating the Wild Child, which may frustrate readers, since the way Collins delineates his attempts to break into Morgan's hermetic existence of math and music (two of the most common obsessions with autists and savants) is so fascinating. At one point, to stop Morgan from yelling, Collins simply gives him a bus schedule, which Morgan then intently studies, lost in his happy universe of numbers. This is a smart, compassionate study of autists "the ultimate square pegs" and how they see the world, darkly, through the thickets of their own genius.
