Customer Reviews

Send in the Idiots

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From ages four to seven Nazeer attended an experimental school in New York City for autistic children. Twenty years later, he decided to interview his fellow students and write a book about "how they have emerged into adulthood." Out of his dozen or so classmates, three agreed to participate as well as the parents of a fourth who had committed suicide.

The result is an insightful and captivating set of portraits, linked by their subjects' autism, of course, and also by the author's thoughtful consideration of each person.

"Autistic individuals find it difficult to develop intuition or empathy," Nazeer states in his introduction. "So much of what animates our lives - conversation, thought, creativity, friendship, politics - draws on understanding the world of other people....I hope to see more clearly not only the substance of their lives but the nature of the world that lies beyond their reach."

From this earnest premise you might expect an interesting but careful sociological approach. And you would not be wrong, just very short of the mark. Nazeer's portraits are anecdotal, sharp, colorful and funny. He works furiously at understanding, and develops illuminating insights valuable because of his autistic perspective, rather than in spite of it. He is not only entertaining and intelligent, but also eye opening.

The three who agreed to participate are, perhaps inevitably, high functioning. Though none had much in the way of language skills at the outset, two (including Nazeer) now have advanced degrees, one works with computers and the fourth had a committed romantic relationship. All came from fairly affluent families.

Each invites Nazeer to stay in his home. This is risky for both subject and author, disrupting routines, forcing spontaneous interactions. Andre is first. He's a computer researcher working on artificial vision and has become interested in the pattern differences between vision (static) and language (dynamic). Andre has problems with language and communication. As a child he habitually shoved a paperclip under his fingernail to, as he put it, force the words out of his mouth.

Now he builds puppets. He puts on shows in the neighborhood and chooses various individuals to accompany him in social situations. While it is okay to interrupt Andre, he flies into a rage if anyone interrupts one of his puppets. Nazeer spent hours locked in the bathroom after one interruption, unable to bring himself to do more than knock timidly on the door.

But while Nazeer bides his time increasingly unhappily in the bathroom, he reflects on the puppets' use, and his own observation of conversation as performance, how a story would morph in front of a group, how challenges could be thrown down on a whim, how topics could swing from the thinnest of threads.

"A phrase in what I said, a topic, a point of view, or nothing at all connects with something that you contain. Then you say something. And like this, we proceed." He contrasts these freewheeling conversations with the academic milieu at Cambridge and ruminates on why conversation there was stifled and people resorted to charades rather than chat.

Randall (Nazeer's second classmate) has a lover in his life to do a lot of his talking. Randall is a bike messenger who rides to work with his eyes closed, the route perfectly timed and memorized. He also writes eloquent, beautifully structured poems. And being the detail-oriented person he is, he has noticed that Mike, his lover, is cheating on him and not for the first time.

"I suddenly realized that I had expected to write only about my classmates, not about the people around them; my conception of this book itself had been an autistic one and it couldn't be sustained."

Craig, the one who used to interrupt his teacher's reading of the newspaper by repeatedly calling out, "Send in the idiots," has become a democratic speech writer. With the democrats out and the republicans in, he is having trouble finding a job. Nobody disputes his skill in arguing and covering all possible talking points, but his social skills are a problem.

This is the funniest of the sections, possibly because he and Nazeer have cultivated their friendship since and there's a lot of affection in the recounting of frictions - like the night they went incognito to a republican fund raiser and couldn't find an argument.

The saddest section, naturally, features the parents of the girl who committed suicide. But here too Nazeer's compassion and intense desire to understand illuminates the roles of the parents, Elizabeth's frustrations and her use of her musical skills as a form of "local coherence," like rocking, to keep from being overwhelmed by friction and complexity.

Nazeer (a British policy adviser) fuses intellect and personality perfectly in his writing. He engages fully in the topic at hand, be it the dizzying complexities of romance or the lovely patterns in a well-constructed argument. Readers will hope this is not his last book.

-- Portsmouth Herald

Our society has seen explosive growth in the number of people identified as autistic and an even larger growth of those identified as having symptoms on the "autistic spectrum". So I expect we'll see more and more books and articles describing these two populations and probably more books like "Send In the Idiots" which tells the story of autistic people as researched and written by an autistic person.

Reading "Send In the Idiots" by Kamran Nazeer is an interesting experience - as much for the writing style as for the content. Indeed, the writing style tells us as much about Nazeer as his book tells us about the four former classmates that he looks up and interviews 20 years later. I initially found myself criticizing the book's editing until I realized how important it was to the book's message.

For those who think an autistic diagnosis is akin to a death sentence or a sentence of life without the normal joys and disappointments, this book should be a revelation. Nazeer, in overly flowery language and excessive attention to detail, shows us how "normal" autistic people can be after (and if) they can manage the extra challenges that autism forces on them. Obsessive compulsive behavior, echolalia, depression, insecurity, paranoia, sensory overload, and other such companion effects of autism make it difficult but not impossible to live an interesting, satisfying life. And the stories of the four classmates show us that it is dangerous indeed to stereotype people with autism. They are each unique, special, human. In fact, we begin to see in them elements of our own personality and being to wonder if each of us is also on the "autism spectrum".

The book is upbeat and shows that autistic people do "get better", not in eliminating the disability but in coping with it and reducing its constraints. This is a must-read book for anyone interested in autism.

My son has a diagnosis on the autism spectrum and my bookshelf is overflowing with books about autism. Unlike another reviewer I did not find this book discouraging.
This book gave me a wonderful insight into how it is for my son to learn the mechanics of communication that come intuatively to neurotypical people. And many times the mechanics are much more interesting to the author than the content of the conversation. For example he was told that his teacher had been assaulted by a parent. I was waiting for him to ask and share why this assault took place and what had happend to the parent and child but instead he went on about the conversation itself. I had to laugh because clearly very different aspects of that story were interesting to us and I appreciated that as an insight.
This book reminded me of books I have read by people traveling back to their home to find their roots to explain who they are. What does it mean for him and his old classmates to have autism? What has it ment to their lives? Autism has put odds in their way but has also forced them to become deliberate and resourceful.

So I guess if you are looking for a book that makes you see people with autism as overcoming all obstacles or being doomed or savants then this might not be your book. It is not a book offering knowledge on how to raise your autistic child. It is a book about a few people with autism who struggle and succed and fail much in the same and jet a different way as all of humanity.

This book is a gift. It provides insight into the minds of those on the autism spectrum. Nazeer offers sharp and funny and poignant stories from his childhood and of his fellow students that capture the alternative reality, the sometimes painful differentness that autistic/Asperger's people experience. As a mother of a daughter with Asperger's, this book offered me a glimpse into her psyche that I hadn't had before. The book explodes the stereotype that people on the autism spectrum are stuck; that there is no movement, no growth, no progression, no change. This book also explodes the stereotype that the ridicule, and the loneliness, and the isolation of autism doesn't hurt - that autistic people don't feel - that they cannot be depressed, sad, suicidal. The story of Elizabeth is especially sad. I wonder if it is particularly hard to be female and autistic - the expectation that females be sensitive and empathic - it must be especially hard to not fit into that mold. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has ever encountered autism, or loved someone on the autistic spectrum.

Nazeer says, "Autistic individuals find it difficult to develop intuition or empathy," and convincingly demonstrates that his experience of social interactions and certain kinds of frustration is very different from, well, my own anyway.

But, his writing is brilliant, his metaphors are fresh and apt, he's engaging...this is one of those books that's worth reading just for the writing. But in this case that gives my prejudices a puzzle: If that's not intuition and empathy, what is it? A hard-won kind, perhaps, and in many ways better than the kind I take for granted. But that upsets my ideas of what good writing comes from.

And in fact one of his chapters is about the common assumption that geniuses have it easy. The unthinking dismissal implied by saying that, he's gifted, he's smart, he's obsessed with the subject. Nazeer points out that there's still a hell of a lot of work in preparing for and executing any kind of great work. Still, looking back at Nazeer's own book, I wonder, can you create that kind of style, color, coherence and personality by... work?

In one chapter he rants against a kind of falseness common in conversations. Although I'm tempted to correct his calling it falseness, the point isn't easy to make. Often conversations float above factualness and their substance is about themes, patterns, meta concerns and a kind of shared tacit evolving conspiracy, but I'm left with the uneasy feeling that that sense of substance is "just an intuition," as if I understand it even less than Nazeer does.

Which is to say, I loved these bonus insights and paradoxes, especially when the ride to them was so comfortable and entertaining. I appreciated being allowed into the lives of these people, especially the author.

I really loved this book. It starts out good, and just gets better. Nazeer is a talented writer, and this is a polished work on a wide variety of fascinating topics. These topics include not only autism itself, but range from the nature of political discourse and its impact on the functioning of a healthy democracy all the way to the extent to which our tend to categorize many abilities as innate and in doing so deny the hard work that is always required to develop those abilities.

It's rare to find a book that is this easy and absorbing to read, and yet where you so often find your thinking shifting subtly over and over as you absorb the ideas presented. I highly recommend it.

This book was an eye-opener for me. Since we have a grandchild with ASD, it provided me(us) with an excellent inside and helped me(us) to understand the hurdles which confront children with ASD.
I sincerely hope that Kamran Nazeer will continue to inform the world about this problem -- he already has established himself as a great asset to help find methods which will deal with and asist autistic persons.

Autism is a world like no other. My child was diagnosed at the age of 19 months and we have been living in that world for 3 1/2 years. I felt this book was a very interesting and insightful view to the 'inside' of Autism. I have spent these years trying (and succeeding) at understanding my own child's mind. When I could not find materials to help educate her, I made them myself. I proactively worked at educating my child. I have a website [...] where I have made available items that have successfully helped my child and other children with Autism.

Understanding your child's mind is a wonderful tool for helping them. This was a good book to read and fast-reading book. I also gave me hope for my own child's quirky ways.

The author seems too eloquent and well-adjusted to be autistic, but seems to understand autistic minds well enough that he must have some ability to think autistically. He was clearly autistic as a child, but seems harder to classify now (he mentions people who think he's no longer autistic, and helps us understand why his personality doesn't fit into a standard stereotype).

He provides clear descriptions of how several minds that he studies differ from average minds and from each other. For examples, he describes how perceptual differences prevent one person from understanding ordinary instructions for how to identify a bus stop. Yet that person was quite capable of finding an alternate way to identify it after studying the problem enough. And his realization that people treat conversation as performance, with the entertainment value being more important than the information being exchanged.

Fasinating view of autism from someone who lives it. Multiple outcomes reported from the same viewpoint. Powerful read for those who live with/ work with peolpe on the spectrum.