...the book doesn't stay focused in struggle narratives or it would risk portraying autism as uniformly tragic and requiring pity. Instead it shares the often debilitating aspects of autism yet shows how those with autism can and do flourish with the right supports and environments, and how their lives, and the lives of their families, are filled with joys and triumphs and fun and irreverence too.
The authors come from the world of television news and their book is crafted like a tightly edited news special: The prose is vivid, the tempo rapid and the perspective intimate, as if each character has been filmed with a hand-held camera.
I wept and laughed and raged while reading In a Different Key, all the while thinking, Yes! This is my experience, including the raw and dirty parts, but also the wonder and joy. It’s the bones of a screenplay about what it’s like to be human in this particular, vulnerable way.
The Story of Autism tells a riveting tale about how a seemingly rare childhood disorder became a salient fixture in our cultural landscape. It features vivid portraits of people with autism and their devoted parents and recounts dramatic controversies among well-intentioned and occasionally misguided advocates and doctors who have tried to help those with the condition. These gripping personal stories give the book tremendous narrative drive.
In telling the struggle to make the general public aware of autism, the authors recount the history of this condition. Not in dry clinical terms, but through the human stories of those raising autistic children, of those trying to treat, study and research it and those who are autistic.
While neither as literary nor as searching as, say, Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree, In a Different Key is grounded and sensible, which in the contentious world of autism activism constitutes a kind of grace.
“In a Different Key is a story about autism as it has passed through largely American institutions, shaped not only by psychiatrists and psychologists but by parents, schools, politicians, and lawyers. It shows how, in turn, the condition acquired a powerful capacity both to change those institutions and to challenge our notions of what is pathological and what is normal.
Only when people question where the people with autism are can we live in a society that fully embraces the condition. And only a book like this can help to achieve that world; a book that doesn't cease in tackling a history as complicated as it can be thanks to an ever changing diagnosis, heroes and villains, trends, science, supposed science, misplaced research, the list mounts.
