What this book did for me was make me realize (once again?) that 99% of what we all know to be 'true'about autism is actually the result of flawed thinking, combined with the egotism of a handful psychiatrists,human greed, media frenzy, and the force of loving, desperate parents looking for any way to help their child. The authors cover a huge amount of territory, from the first person who ever received a diagnosis of 'autism' to the latest thinking about what is now known as 'autism spectrum disorder.' The book is written with great compassion and meticulous care. I enjoyed reading In a Different Key a great deal, and I learned a lot from it. There are dark turns too: we learn about experimenters feeding LSD to children with autism, or shocking them with electricity to change their behavior and the authors reveal compelling evidence that Hans Asperger, discoverer of the syndrome named after him, participated in the Nazi program that consigned disabled children to death.< This is also a story of fierce controversies-from the question of whether there is truly an autism “epidemic,” and whether vaccines played a part in it to scandals involving “facilitated communication,” one of many treatments that have proved to be blind alleys to stark disagreements about whether scientists should pursue a cure for autism.

Many others played starring roles too: doctors like Leo Kanner, who pioneered our understanding of autism lawyers like Tom Gilhool, who took the families’ battle for education to the courtroom scientists who sparred over how to treat autism and those with autism, like Temple Grandin, Alex Plank, and Ari Ne’eman, who explained their inner worlds and championed the philosophy of neurodiversity. It is the story of women like Ruth Sullivan, who rebelled against a medical establishment that blamed cold and rejecting “refrigerator mothers” for causing autism and of fathers who pushed scientists to dig harder for treatments.

Unfolding over decades, it is a beautifully rendered history of ordinary people determined to secure a place in the world for those with autism-by liberating children from dank institutions, campaigning for their right to go to school, challenging expert opinion on what it means to have autism, and persuading society to accept those who are different.

Beginning with his family’s odyssey, In a Different Key tells the extraordinary story of this often misunderstood condition, and of the civil rights battles waged by the families of those who have it. Nearly seventy-five years ago, Donald Triplett of Forest, Mississippi became the first child diagnosed with autism.

In a Different Key by John Donvan