We couldn’t be more grateful, humbled, or thrilled about the first wave of reviews for the new Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism Book!
Steve Silberman, investigative reporter for Wired and other national magazines, declared Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism his Book of the Year (!):
Covering a wide range of nuts-and-bolts subjects — from strategizing
toilet training and and planning fun family outings, to helping your kid
cope with bullying, to identifying the issues that a skilled
speech-language therapist can work on with your child, to spotting and
avoiding “autism cults,” to navigating byzantine special-needs
bureaucracies and providing your child with appropriate assistive
technology, to fighting for your kid’s right to an individualized
education — the Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism is bracingly free of dogma, heavy-handed agendas, and pseudoscientific woo. What distinguishes it from, say, the fine guide for parents recently made freely downloadable
by the National Autism Center, is the heart, soul, fierce intelligence,
and subversive wit of the authors and editors, which shines on every
page. Offering observations from parents, professionals, and autistics
themselves, the book is a welcome dose of optimism and uncommonly good
sense.
From Sullivan at Left Brain Right Brain: Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism: The Book:
The Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism has been a very successful website with excellent discussion for some time now, and now the book is available. You can buy it on Amazon. From CreateSpace you can read the short blurb:
Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism (TPGA) is the
resource we wish we’d had when autism first became part of our lives: a
one-stop source for carefully curated, evidence-based information from
autistics, autism parents, and autism professionalsHaving read the first two chapters I agree with the statement above.
It is a resource I wish I had when my kid was diagnosed. Sure, I’d
have loved to have read this book before and been better prepared.
From Caroline Miller at Child Mind Institute: Parenting and Autism: Uncommon Empathy Required
We hear that one of our favorite websites, the Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, has a new book out today, a collection of pieces by their thoughtful and emotionally astute writers. You can buy it here, and they say the Kindle edition will be available soon.
It’s a good excuse to try to describe what’s so valuable about the
voices collected on TPGA.
I think it’s the power of personal experience
combined with hard-headedness about information. It’s the combination
of warmth and realism: you feel the love the writers have for their kids
(and other people’s kids) even while (or exactly while) they are
telling the truth about how difficult it is be to be a parent to those
kids, and how imperfect we all are at it.
From Jean Winegardner at The Washington Times Communities (and a contributor to the book), in her Holiday Gift Guide: Books About Autism:
One of the best sites on the web for information about autism from
parents, professionals, and autistic people themselves, the editors at Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism have just published their first book featuring contributors (including the author of this column) offering many points of view.
We appreciate all the kind words, and for their role in getting our book noticed (it’s been selling like hotcakes). We hope you’ll be motivated to get a copy of the book for yourself, or for someone who could really use solid advice about autism!
[You can get HTML code here to put an Amazon link on your own website!]