Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism - Hardcover

Paul Collins

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1904132340 ISBN 13: 9781904132349

Publisher: Fusion Press, 2004

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

Paul Collins and his wife Jennifer thought their son was perfect. At age one, Morgan learned the alphabet; by two, he was reading, counting, even doing multiplication tables--yet he couldn't respond to his own name and scarcely noticed others in the room. He was, as it turned out, autistic--gifted, intelligent, preternaturally focused, but a stranger in the strange land of human emotions. Fortunately, Paul Collins is eminently suited to act as his guide. The author of Banvard's Folly and the bibliophile's delight Sixpence House, Collins is a very particular kind of historian: an archaelogist of the arcane and a lover of eccentric people and facts. Not Even Wrong turns that love to the best possible use. Part memoir, part history, it traces the lives of suspected autists both famous and obscure, from Peter the Wild Boy, a semi-feral child who became a sensation at the court of George I, to Henry Darger, the recluse and outsider artist. Collins dabbles in neurology and science history, but what emerges is nothing less than a portrait of how Morgan's mind works--as well as a respectful and fascinating account of those with autism and their contributions to our world. --Mary Park

About the Author:

Paul Collins is the author of Sixpence House and Banvard's Folly. He edits the Collins Library for McSweeney's Books, and his work has appeared in New Scientist, Business 2.0, and Tin House.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fusion Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1904132340
• ISBN 13: 9781904132349
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288