PanThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)It is a set of choppy, fragmentary essays, some of which veer off on so many tangents that they verge on incoherence. Perhaps that is intentional, the shifting kaleidoscopic prose echoing the broken, tenuous hold of the narrator on our shared \'commonsense\' reality. But it makes for an often frustrating and unsatisfying read ... More often, despite her credentials as a novelist, her attempts to evoke the horrors and suffering attendant on serious forms of mental illness fall flat.
Edith Sheffer
RaveLos Angeles Review of Books\"... fascinating and disturbing ... An impressive piece of historical detective work, [Asperger’s Children] deserves a wide readership ... Sheffer’s meticulous archival research into Asperger’s writings and professional activities has brought to light an entirely different facet of the man [than the benevolent image constructed] ... Despite the fragmentary nature of the surviving records, Sheffer is able to document not one but dozens of such cases [of brutality].\
Lone Frank
PanThe Wall Street JournalTo Ms. Frank, Heath was 'dapper,' 'charming,' 'tough as nails,' 'bubbling with ideas,' 'a gifted, curious scientist'—anything but the monster some of his contemporaries believed him to be. Ethical objections to his cavalier experiments or concerns about the purely speculative basis of his dangerous interventions, Ms. Frank seems to think, can safely be set aside ... No footnotes interrupt her cliché-ridden prose, and extraordinary claims are retailed with no attempt to assess the evidence on which they presumably rest ... In passing, the author mentions that the two major controlled studies to date on deep-brain stimulation have failed to show that it produces better results than a placebo ... But soon Ms. Frank is back in her speculative science-fiction world.
David Oshinsky
RaveThe Wall Street Journal...[an] admirable portrait of the hospital’s long and complex history ... Mr. Oshinsky is excellent in describing the subsequent transformation of Bellevue and the difficulties it faced in the 20th century in competing with fancier private hospitals ... The hospital has been fortunate in its historian.
