Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism - Softcover

Temple Grandin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307275655 ISBN 13: 9780307275653

Publisher: Vintage, 2006

Synopsis

Temple Grandin, Ph.D., is a gifted animal scientist who has designed one third of all the livestock-handling facilities in the United States. She also lectures widely on autism—because Temple Grandin is autistic, a woman who thinks, feels, and experiences the world in ways that are incomprehensible to the rest of us.

In this unprecedented book, Grandin delivers a report from the country of autism. Writing from the dual perspectives of a scientist and an autistic person, she tells us how that country is experienced by its inhabitants and how she managed to breach its boundaries to function in the outside world. What emerges in Thinking in Pictures is the document of an extraordinary human being, one who, in gracefully and lucidly bridging the gulf between her condition and our own, sheds light on the riddle of our common identity.

About this title

Review:

Oliver Sacks calls Temple Grandin's first book--and the first picture of autism from the inside--"quite extraordinary, unprecedented and, in a way, unthinkable." Sacks told part of her story in his An Anthropologist on Mars, and in Thinking in Pictures Grandin returns to tell her life history with great depth, insight, and feeling. Grandin told Sacks, "I don't want my thoughts to die with me. I want to have done something ... I want to know that my life has meaning ... I'm talking about things at the very core of my existence." Grandin's clear exposition of what it is like to "think in pictures" is immensely mind-broadening and basically destroys a whole school of philosophy (the one that declares language necessary for thought). Grandin, who feels she can "see through a cow's eyes," is an influential designer of slaughterhouses and livestock restraint systems. She has great insight into human-animal relations. It would be mere justice if Thinking in Pictures transforms the study of religious feeling, too.

From the Publisher:

The captivating subject of Oliver Sack's Anthropologist on Mars, here is Temple Grandin's personal account of living with autism extraordinary gift of animal empathy has transformed her world and ours.

Temple Grandin is renowned throughout the world as a designer of livestock holding equipment. Her unique empathy for animals has her to create systems which are humane and cruel free, setting the highest standards for the industry the treatment and handling of animals. She also happens to be autistic. Here, in Temple Grandin's own words, is the story what it is like to live with autism. Temple is among the few people who have broken through many the neurological impairments associated with autism. Throughout her life, she has developed unique coping strategies, including her famous "squeeze machine," modeled after seeing the calming effect squeeze chutes on cattle. She describes her pain isolation growing up "different" and her discovery visual symbols to interpret the "ways of the natives" Thinking In Pictures also gives information from the frontlines of autism, including treatme medication, and diagnosis, as well as Temple's insight into genius, savants, sensory phenomena, etc. Ultimately, it is Temple's unique ability describe the way her visual mind works and how she first made the connection between her impairment and animal temperament that is the basis of extraordinary gift and phenomenal success.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0307275655
• ISBN 13: 9780307275653
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 270