Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism Named “Book of the Year”

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…

At the Dog Park

T.C. www.ihavethings.blogspot.com I vacillate on the autism thing, and how it applies to N. I use it around the school, because it is a strap, a grabbing-on point, a way for people to understand my son and–very much more to the point–to justify putting forth time, effort, and especially money to help him. I use it because doctors and therapists have used it to describe him. I use it because it’s the primary disability listed on his IEP. But there are so many ways in which he doesn’t seem, to me, to fit on the spectrum part of the spectrum. I describe him, often, as the triangular peg who not only doesn’t fit in the round hole, but doesn’t look all that much like the square peg, either. And yet. And yet, professionals of all stripes see him on a regular basis, and talk to me about him with concern…