Jack Peterson

In 1983, I took a year off from the corporate world to write a novel. I just wanted to prove I could do it. It was in the days before the internet and a computer, so I researched my novel the hard way (i.e., the library and historical records resulting in a pile of handwritten and nearly illegible notes). After going through several drafts, I finally had the manuscript professionally prepared. Without a literary agent, I sent the novel unsolictited to five publishers and had two offers. To my surprise, Balance of Power became a best seller (paperback) and was in the top 10 in several major cities in late 1984. By that time, I was already back in the corporate world, quickly putting an abrupt end to my brief writing carrer.

In 2006, after reading David Kirby's EVIDENCE OF HARM, I became so intrigued with autism that I started doing some research of my own. My interest had been piqued in part years earlier by an interview I saw on a prime-time network television show (I believe the program was 60 Minutes). The network host interviewed a young autistic girl, highlighting a remarkable sketch of a horse she apparenlty created when she was barely five years old. Prior to the taping the show, network reporters photograhed the sketch, along with some of the young girl's other sketches from the same period, and took them to several art historians and dealers and asked their opinions of the young lady's work. The field reporters offered the art experts no insight as to the origin of the sketches. To their surprise, more than one expert was convinced the young girl's sketches may have come from Leonardo da Vinci himself (most guessed from da Vinci's early teen years). At the time of the interview, the young girl was already a teen and apparently had either totally lost interest in her art or had mysteriously lost her ability altogether to reproduce another drawing that equaled those she created as a child. Unfortunately, she also displayed no interest in discussing her art. I was so intrigued by the interview that I always wanted to investigate further. Was the artist just publicity shy or did she really lose her artistic ability and, if so, why? After discovering autism had no recorded history in the world prior to 1945, David Kirby's book only added fuel to my desire to write the story of this young girl. My extended resarch led to myriad controversies and misunderstandings that surround the genesis and treatment of autism and, as a result,I took my novel down an entirely different path than I originally envisioned. Historically accurate in every detail, the novel entertains and educates without reading like a textbook. I owe a note of thanks to my friend Saul Turteltaub, a 3-time Emmy Award Nominee and Peabody Award winning writer, who encouraged me to write the story. Thanks to so many supporters, A THIN PLACE as of September 2013 went into the second printing and is now available in all e-book formats as well.