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64 of 83 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Outside-in parental catharsis, September 25, 2003
First of all, this book claims to be a view of autism from the inside out. Given that there are no quotes by autistic people in the book, and no photographs by autistic people, this strains credibility. It is very much an outside-in look at autism, and very parent-oriented. It is filled with excellent black-and-white photographs of autistic children and occasionally what looks like an adult (although it only says "children"), with quotations across from them in fancy layouts.Probably the two best things about this book are the photography and the fact that it deliberately bursts some stereotypes. The black-and-white photographs of autistic people are very well-done. The quotations and the photographs alike blast apart myths like the one that autistic people cannot express love. Unfortunately, there are a lot of bad things about this book. I cannot easily forgive the fact that it claims to give an inside-out view when it is nothing of the sort -- although it seems to be trying to do the same thing as a photography project by autistic people that I've seen, that truly *is* an inside-out view and much less grim about how horrible autism is, even if it depicts people of similar levels of ability as the children in the book. The other thing is that grimness. The book uses a lot of negative emotional language to describe autism, words that make autism into a nightmarish melodrama. It compares autism to death. I may be autistic, I even may have 'regressed', but I'm the furthest thing from dead that I've seen in a long time. While I suspect that many parents may perceive autism that way, I don't like this in a book called "Souls: Beneath and Beyond Autism". If you're going to try to show the souls of people like me, it's better to do it right. You don't compare us to dead people, for starters, and you don't use a lot of language that evokes brokenness and despair. It is true that autistic people can be beautiful to a deep level beyond physical appearance, but this is not something as easily separated from autism as the title implies. It makes it sound like you have to look past autism to see these things, which seems to me to be a prejudice of neurotypicals -- that they think they have to look away from autism to see certain good things in a person, when autistic people can often look at each other, autism and all, and see the good without having to emphasize a distance from autism. We also don't normally have to make up for an overly dramatic negative view of ourselves by turning around at the end and portraying ourselves as teachers sent from God. These are things non-autistic people have to do in order to deal with *their* feelings about us. It says nothing about us itself. I do believe that this book could be very cathartic for parents, and I don't want to discount the work that went into it. But I don't especially enjoy the way it portrayed people like me, and the way in which it claimed to look "beneath autism". In the end, it was mainly, from this autistic person's point of view anyway, a study on the evolution of prejudice, from negative to positive, in the contributors. I am sure they love their children, but that does not mean I like this portrayal. I am glad I am old enough and communicative enough at this age to avoid my photograph being placed in this collection. I will save it, if anything, for some day in the future when there will be a similar book by autistic people, in which our own words about ourselves will be there.
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