Boy Alone: A Brother's Memoir [Hardcover]

Karl Taro Greenfeld (Author)

Book Description

Release date: May 12, 2009

Karl Taro Greenfeld's brother Noah was not like other babies. He couldn't crawl, he couldn't speak, he had trouble making eye contact and interacting with his family members. Karl knew his brother wasn't normal and his parents knew something was wrong with their younger son but no one - not doctors, specialists, or social workers - could say what exactly was the problem with Noah. As Noah got older, his differences became more pronounced. He never developed the skills of self-sufficiency that other children learn, and as a young boy he was unable to tie his own shoes, use the toilet, or verbally communicate. Noah also became prone to violence, both towards himself and others. He spat and clawed at eyes and pulled hair, and as he grew older he began to inflict physical harm on himself by scratching, hitting himself, and endlessly banging his head against hard surfaces. Noah's parents, Josh Greenfeld and Foumiko Kometani, dedicated their lives to caring for their boy. But "Boy Alone" is not the story of Noah; it is the story Karl, who spent his childhood and his life in the shadow of autism, tending to the needs of a disabled sibling while trying to determine his own needs and his own path. "Boy Alone" is an examination of two lives - Karl's and Noah's - and an investigation into what 'a life' really means. Can consciousness exist without self-consciousness? Can consciousness exist without language? What caused Noah's autism and can the effects be reversed? At the same time, the family of an autistic child is forced to confront more practical questions of existence: how do aging parents care for a nonverbal, often violent grown man? Of all the methods for 'dealing with' autism-multivitamin therapy, Operant Conditioning, Facilitation, Behaviorism, Freudian psychoanalyses, mainstreaming-is there anything that can be done to help an autistic child or adult become a member of mainstream society?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Sibling rivalry—and love—of a ravaging kind is the subject of this unsparing memoir of the author's life with his severely autistic brother. Journalist Greenfeld (Standard Deviations) describes his brother, Noah, as a spitting, jibbering, finger-twiddling, head-bobbing idiot; unable to speak or clean himself and given to violent tantrums, Noah and his utter indifference to others makes him permanently alone. But Karl feels almost as alienated; with his parents preoccupied with Noah's needs (and Noah's celebrity after his father, Joshua, wrote a bestselling account of his illness in A Child Called Noah), he turns to drugs and petty crime in the teenage wasteland of suburban Los Angeles. Greenfeld doesn't flinch in his depiction of Noah's raging dysfunctions or his critique of a callous mental health-care system and arrogant autism-research establishment. (He's especially hard on the psychoanalytic theories of the Viennese charlatan Bruno Bettelheim.) But the author's self-portrait is equally lacerating; he often wallows in self-pity—I return home stoned, drunk, puking on myself as I sit defecating into the toilet, crying to my parents... that I am a failure—and owns up to the coldness that Noah's condition can provoke in him. The result is a bleak but affecting chronicle of a family simultaneously shattered and bound tight by autism. (May)
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Review

“Gripping.” (Suki Casanave, Washington Post )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1 edition (May 12, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061136662
• ISBN-13: 978-0061136665
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,084,015 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Karl Taro Greenfeld is the author of five previous books, including the much-acclaimed memoir Boy Alone; NowTrends; China Syndrome; Standard Deviations; and Speed Tribes. Greenfeld's fiction has appeared in such renowned publications as The Paris Review, Best American Short Stories, American Short Fiction, The PEN/O Henry Prize Stories, The Missouri Review, One Story, Commentary, The Southern Review, and The Sun. A veteran editor and writer for The Nation, TIME, and Sports Illustrated, Karl has also been a frequent contributor to Bloomberg Businessweek, The New York Times, GQ, Vogue, Conde Nast Traveler, Playboy, Men's Journal, The Washington Post, Outside, Wired, Details, and Salon. Born in Kobe, Japan, Karl has lived in Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo and TRIBECA.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 38 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A brutal and beautiful tale May 14, 2009

By Dean Kuipers

Format:Hardcover

Greenfeld has written a powerful, maddening book, pitting sentences that are a joy to read against a raw honesty that is almost impossible to accept. It is a work of philosophy as endurance contest. The story of his profoundly autistic younger brother, Noah, is a descent by degrees, the deterioration of a child who begins with all the ordinary promise of his big brother but then slides irrevocably to become a mute and sometimes violent and possibly insane adult.

In the burgeoning field of works on autism, this book is like a hatchet thrown at the canon door. The idea that the best parents cannot save a child is rejected with a kind of violence by the prevailing talk-show culture, but that is exactly what happens here. Noah walks into a relentlessly upbeat field of miracle cures and made-for-TV empowerment and overly moralistic breakthroughs with a terrifying defiance. Most of the growing number of new books on this subject are written by celebrated doctors and celebrities and shamen-dudes who address the uplifting and fascinating cases of high-functioning children who just need the right push to find a grip on reality and rise up to lead satisfying lives. As desperately as Karl seems to want this, growing up stoned and alienated in 1970s and `80s Pacific Palisades, it refuses to materialize.

Instead, Karl's memoir addresses the ineffable, the humanity that inhabits a well-educated and successful family whose child does not get better. Karl's father, screenwriter Josh Greenfield, who himself wrote three highly-regarded books on Noah, and his mother, Foumi, who wrote novels based on her experience, do everything that superhuman parents can do: they shatter the prevailing Freudian treatment models that imprison their child, pioneer operant conditioning, create diets and schools and routines for caregivers. They devote 20 years of their lives. And they admit that they fail.

With the same honesty and ear for storytelling that has made Karl's other books and stories such great reads, he rips into one of the most un-American of subjects: helplessness. When the lottery doesn't hit. When wanting yields nothing. And in the end, he deploys a literary device that is cruel and devastating, driving the point home with a hammer blow. He's such a good writer that it really hurts - even now, weeks after finishing this book. And for that he's to be admired. And forgiven.

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Fly Like an Eagle May 21, 2009

By BeatleBangs1964 TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

"Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping,
Into the future.

I want to fly like an eagle, till I'm free.
Fly like an eagle, let my spirit carry me."
----Steve Miller Band, 1976

At last! For years I have hoped Karl Greenfeld would share his experiences of growing up with his younger brother, Noah, whom Karl describes as "the most famous autistic child in the United States." Karl's father, Josh Greenfeld wrote a trilogy of brutally honest books about life raising his boys. The Noah Trilogy, as "A Child Called Noah," "A Place For Noah" and "A Client Called Noah" have been called have helped unmask the myth of saintly families who cheerfully sacrifice all for a member with multiple challenges. Josh Greenfeld's books are refreshingly brutal in their unabashed honesty.

Before and After Zachariah: A Family Story About a Different Kind of Courage, which began as an article in the January 1980 issue of "Redbook" and was later expanded into book form mentions "A Place For Noah" by describing the "patchwork after school programs of the day care center." This book also describes the plight of the multiply challeged and the dire need for good placements.

Karl, long relegated to the background because of his younger brother's great needs has finally taken his turn at bat. Born in Japan on November 26 1964, some 18 months before Noah's birth on July 1, 1966, Karl describes his life in the New York suburb of Croton, unaware of a life before and without Noah. He describes his life with Noah; as boys he said he and Noah did not grow up together; they grew apart.

In 1978 "60 Minutes" aired a segment about life with Noah; a follow up to Noah's story was broadcast in 1998. It is interesting that Karl said in 1978 that he did not want to be on television because, according to him, "he hadn't done anything" and that the story was really about Noah. Fortunately Karl does make an appearance in the segment, which would NOT have been nearly as moving or as effective had he not.

Interspersed with passages from his father's diaries, Karl's voice resonates loud and clear. His impressions appear to jibe with that of his father's; over time, the two would lock horns over many issues, such as Karl's burgeoning independence and sense of self.

Karl himself is described first by Josh Greenfeld in the Noah trilogy by his distinctive beginning. A handsome, Eurasian man, Karl reflects on being a member of a biracial family. Karl's mother Foumi is Japanese; Josh is Jewish. In "A Place For Noah," Karl describes himself as "half-Jewish and half Japanese; half Buddhist and half Jewish" and identifies Asian items and products in the household, such as foods and their car, which was a Japanese import. He draws on his Asian heritage, musing on how his work ethic differs and even clashes with Foumi's, who cannot understand why Karl has taken such a lackadaisical attitude toward school. Josh even enrolls the boy in a Japanese juku, or "cram school" so as to give him a leg up in mathematics. Karl is the only member of the class who is Eurasian and unable to speak Japanese. Sadly, the juku does not meet Karl's needs at that time.

Bright and resourceful, Karl in adolescence meticulously mapped out war zones and strategies in his own home, using military model weapons as props for his detailed strategy. School was not a priority for Karl during his adolescence; he spends much of those years taking drugs and running with a questionable crowd.

Like Josh, Karl is delightfully brutally honest. He describes his fall from grace; his years of sinking and slinking deeper into drug abuse and trouble. As Karl's challenges arise, Noah's recede slightly. By 1979, Noah, then 13 is enrolled in the Behavior Modification Institute. Noah serves several months there until it is discovered that he is being abused. He was withdrawn from the BMI (called OCC in "A Place For Noah") and once again the focus was understandably back on Noah. Severely autistic and cognitively delayed, Noah's self help skills remain marginal at best, absent at worst. His lack of speech continues to be a problem. Luckily, the Marlton School for the Deaf accepts him in their Special Program and it is there that Noah learns rudimentary signs and does well under their program.

By the early 1980s, the Greenfelds come up with the ingenius solution of buying a second house, so that Noah can live in his boyhood home with caretakers and they can enjoy respite in a home in the area. They continue checking in with Noah and Karl even spends some nights with Noah. Upon Noah's graduation from Marlton, Karl accompanies him to the school dance, where he is ready to do battle for Noah when his deaf classmates look askance at him.

Noah's caretakers range from a sexual predator named Ben to two very kind men from Japan who help him master many new skills. One has Noah on a strict exercise regimen, taking him out running on a local track. The other teaches Noah how to swim. Josh even said in "A Client Called Noah" that Noah loved the two men from Japan and thrived under their tutelage.

Karl, after years of backsliding into the abyss of drug addiction, graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 1986 and carved out a career for himself as a writer. He is amazingly self-deprecating in re his career of choice. He says his decision to be a writer underscores "a lack of imagination." Au contraire. His decision speaks to a real talent, one he inherited from Josh and Foumi, both of whom are published writers. He continues his steady climb uphill, after a stint in rehab in the 1990s. He later marries his long-time girlfriend, Silka and the couple are blessed with two daughters.

Karl's brief thumbnail sketches of his girls and his pure love for them (Josh described loving Noah as "purity;" Karl would later use this term in describing paternal parental love for his girls) are quite heartwarming. Silka's steadfast determination to stand by Karl's side as he struggles through rehab makes me think of the 1976 Steve Miller classic, "Fly Like an Eagle" and the hymn, "On Eagle's Wings." Karl does take off on Eagle's Wings and he does soar. By claiming his literary voice, he finds his place in the literary world with several published books to his credit.

Karl is also a gifted story teller. He is a master at taking his reading audience along for the ride. Gary Wright's 1975 "Dream Weaver" could easily be the soundtrack for the last chapter of this book. Without spoiling anything, let's just say that he is very good at convincing his audience and then he cleverly comes out from behind the curtain to take his bow.

I love this book.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Searing Memoir May 14, 2009

By J. Hindell

Format:Hardcover

Karl Taro Greenfeld's new memoir Boy ALone is a searing account of growing up in a family with an autistic sibling. In a world where autism is rising exponentially, we hear all too rarely from the brothers and sisters of autistic children. Here Greenfeld describes, sometimes in harrowing detail, the strains of living with someone who is severely autistic. The family's attention inevitably centers on Noah, the autistic brother. Greenfeld deals honestly and compassionately with his family's struggle to find an answer to Noah's condition and takes a cold, hard look at what autism means for the three generations of his family who cope with it. This beautifully written book is not just an account of a family dealing with extraordinary circumstances but a reflection on the meaning of family and a powerful portrait of childhood.