12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
AMAZING BOOK, AMAZING FAMILY, June 21, 2004
This review is from: Maverick Mind (Hardcover)
Our family has been lucky enough to meet Dr. Florance and her 3 children after reading her book. It not only gave faces to the names, but it was a joy to see how wonderful they are as a family. Dr. Florance's book has helped our family understand another way of looking at how our brain functions. This book is not a tutorial, however it is a window for some autistics who you know can understand everything that is said to them and can communicate in their minds, just not through their voice. My husband is a neurosurgeon who has a lifetime of not understanding how his brain worked "differently" from others, our 5 year old is gifted and absolutely a visual learner, and our 4 year old son has been diagnosed with autism and PDD since he was 2 years old. After months of different therapy that seemed to just to be going through the motions, one of our therapist brought us this book and it was like turning a light bulb on. Our son, so much like Florance's, can run a computer, a dvd player, and appears to understand everything said to him, yet cannot form correct speech. This book is for those who want to learn how their child's brain is working and then how to possibly find ways to "re-wire" or concentrate on areas to eventually bring those "pictures" to words. I would highly recommend this book for those who enjoy a heart-warming story of a mother's "gut instinct" and determination; and also for those who are looking at another way to understand how some highly visual learners and some autistics are "wired" differently.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Please read this before you decide not to read this book!!!, February 21, 2006
I have read this book several times and my son is a client of Cheri Florance's. I noticed several complaints in the other reviews. One that I saw several times was that Dr.Florance's son Whitney was obviously very high functioning and only had Aspergers or PDD. You need to go back and re-read the book. Whitney had no speech and was urinating on people up until the age of almost seven. He was showing the symtoms of someone considered severely autistic at an age when most of our current methods of intervention would consider him hopeless. Secondly, there were many complaints that Dr.Florance did not do anything that had not been done before. I can tell you that her program is different and contains elements not detailed in the book that I have not seen before and my son has had PECS and four years of ABA. One must also keep in mind when reading this book that only a subset of kids on the spectrum and the population at large fit this profile. Dr.Florance is not promising a cure for all autistic kids, nor has she made any promises to cure my son. She offers hope to the parents of children who fit this profile. She mentions her credentials, and they are impressive, because she has to.The book details the personal attacks she has had to fight and, reading many of the responses to her book,still fights.Cheri Florance's book is inspiring and I think parents and professionals should be able to find something enlightening and useful instead of being so quick to criticize. We need more people willing to find creative ways to help children on the spectrum as current methods are only effective in providing a quality of life for a select few.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A stunning account of a real journey from infantile social isolation to integration, November 25, 2008
Reminiscent of the pains and passions of her like-minded predecessors in Paul de Kruif (A Man Against Insanity, 1957) and Oliver Sacks (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, 1985), Florance records here a first-person account of her investigatory clinical observations and discoveries for a non-specialist readership. Coining the term `Maverick Minds' to describe her highly-visual/low-verbal functioning patients (the key example of the book being one of her own children), the author relates a personal 15-year adventure to include the sufferings (and eventual pleasures) evolving around the development of a potentially `closed' autistic-like behaving boy, to relatively high-functioning, literate, collegiate scholar. With a maverick enthusiasm (in the usual sense of the word) and a stubborn determinism to solve the mystery of her son's aberrant infant behaviour, Florance tells of how she embarked upon a number of scientifically-informed remedial educational intervention practices and training schedules of her own design, whilst stubbornly rejecting the classical diagnoses of her own child as being `autistic'. This method of enquiry (so often neglected in the pursuit of clinical categorisation and prognostic intervention pattern-matching, in my view), was ardently pursued by Florance in an attempt to determine (and focus upon) what the young `autistic-like' boy could do, rather than remaining content to determine what he could not do, in order to develop her training techniques. Many of this book's 18 chapters repeat this theme (though not always explicitly), and it is in tribute to Florance, both as participant investigator and author, that her perseverance and tenacity has resulted in the brighter future now available to her son, and to many others who may now be able to benefit from her writings, and continued clinical work.
Those familiar with the lives of autistic children (whether with specific or more broad-spectrum component diagnoses), will not be surprised to read the authors' frequent references to the life and work of Helen Keller (and her barrier-breaker, Annie Sullivan). Indeed, it is entirely appropriate that Keller's experience be recounted as an example in guiding the non-technical (or less neurophilosophically inclined) reader to understand the authors' logic, as they recount the various stages of the developing `maverick mind' from infantile social isolation, through protolinguistic competency, towards gradual (although significantly delayed) social integration with age-matched peers, as said to have been exhibited during her son's adolescence. I would personally have preferred to also read of the ontological developing brain story which might accompany Florance's arguments (complete with discussion of the emerging plasticity of specific neural circuits in the brain), but perhaps that may await a further volume. Although little clear evidence for emerging neural connectivity development is currently available in addressing Florance's claims directly, I can foresee that such stories are readily beginning to emerge from a piecing together from a variety of fMRI studies now conducted (rather than relying upon the more traditionally favoured pharmacological, and morbid anatomy literature).
Further welcome additions to this volume, would include a searchable index, perhaps a glossary of key terms, and some references to the relevant scientific research literature supporting Florance's thinking (though a few website addresses available at the time of publication, were provided for exploration and further reading). By no means a failure of this highly stimulating, motivating, (and I hope) inspiring work, this book relates a story of a `classic' kind, written by a consultant practitioner who is highly passionate about her field, and one which I will be highly recommending to many of my student psychologists and clinical interns seeking a career in remedial education, a concerned parent seeking a role model, or an educational consultant needing a gentle reminder to be alert to what presenting children can do.
Dr. Tony Dickinson.
Academic Research Laboratory, People Impact International Inc, HK. 2008.
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