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Summary
Summary
An astounding new work by the author of The Mind Tree that offers a rare insight into the autistic mind and how it thinks, sees, and reacts to the world. When he was three years old, Tito was diagnosed as severely autistic, but his remarkable mother, Soma, determined that he would overcome the "problem" by teaching him to read and write. The result was that between the ages of eight and eleven he wrote stories and poems of exquisite beauty, which Dr. Oliver Sacks called "amazing and shocking." Their eloquence gave lie to all our assumptions about autism. Here Tito goes even further and writes of how the autistic mind works, how it views the outside world and the "normal" people he deals with daily, how he tells his stories to the mirror and hears stories back, how sounds become colors, how beauty fills his mind and heart. With this work, Tito--whom Portia Iversen, co-founder of Cure Autism Now, has described as "a window into autism such as the world has never seen"--gives the world a beacon of hope. For if he can do it, why can't others? "Brave, bold, and deeply felt, this book shows that much we might have believed about autism can be wrong."--Boston Globe
Author Notes
Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay was diagnosed in early childhood with severe or low functioning non-verbal autism. He communicates primarily through writing and has learned to develop his reading, writing, and thinking abilities. The national organization Autism Speaks sponsored Tito and his mother, Soma, to come to the United States so he could participate in scientific trials. Tito is now an accomplished writer. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In short chapters, some including evocative prose poems, Mukhopadhyay, a severely autistic adolescent whose mother painstakingly taught him how to read and write, introduces the reader to his daily inner life. Sometimes his thoughts are compulsive-he misses an entire film while mentally drawing diagonals across every one of the design squares on the cinema's ceiling-and sometimes fragmented, as when looking at a bucket: "I might easily get distracted by its redness, since it would remind me of how my hands bled when I had fallen from a swing, how I was so absorbed in that red that I had forgotten about my pain, and how that red resembled a hibiscus...." Mukhopadhyay reflects on autism without romanticizing it, acknowledging "my physical and neurological limitations" and declaring, "I am not worried about hell because I have experienced it here on earth." Occasionally, his writing is somewhat sketchy, but for the most part this is an eye-opening book on a serious disorder and the hope that other autistic children can learn to transcend it through education and imaginative self-reflection. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
First-person narrative of living with severe autism. Diagnosed at age three, Mukhopadhyay (The Gold of the Sunbeams, 2005, etc.) was virtually mute. As a child he could not look at faces; he reports that even today recognizing faces remains extremely difficult, even threatening, especially if any social interaction is necessary. When stressed or fearful, he screams uncontrollably; when overwhelmed by sensory input, he flaps his hands repeatedly. Reflections in a mirror and shadows on the ground hold stories that only he can sense. He finds new situations or unexpected changes in his environment intensely disturbing, even alarming. He becomes obsessed with certain familiar objects--a rotating overhead fan, light switches, staircases and escalators, buses and trains. During a period living in California, he felt "trapped in a plastic box, suffocated" if he could not take the same bus-and-metro trip every day. Fortunately for Mukhopadhyay, he was raised by an extraordinarily determined and persistent mother. Parents of autistic children will take special interest in his mother's step-by-step methods for controlling his aggressive and repetitive behaviors and for teaching him to perform simple tasks like tying his shoes and putting on a shirt. With her help, he learned when he was about six to trace and then write the letters of the alphabet and eventually to form them into words. Poems emerged that reveal his unique sensibility: "And all my mirror tales are gone / As my life goes on and on / Through my age, yet stories follow / Into the world of my shadow." Questioning his reason for being, he tells himself that perhaps it is to remind people to be thankful for their gifts. Mukhopadhyay's detailed account of how the autistic mind works sheds light on a condition usually characterized by the inability to communicate. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Eighteen when he completed this book, Mukhopadhyay is severely autistic. He dislikes how he sounds when he speaks, and speaking is difficult for him, anyway, so he generally doesn't. The book's title refers to the quandary speech initially put him in. As a small child, he conceived lip movement as necessarily precedent to voicing words; since he couldn't get his lips to move, he couldn't vocalize. He communicates spendidly in writing, though, as in brief chapters he recalls how he learned virtually all the things many other very bright youngsters have learned at his age. And he is exceptionally knowledgeable as well as bright, thanks to a mother who started educating him verbally while very deliberately helping him learn physical routines (dressing, drawing, etc.) as a toddler. Hence, he is obviously a whiz at math and science. He knows English poetry well, too part of the language skills that he exercises as no one has before to tell us, the neurologically normal, what the world is like to one who genuinely sees things differently.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2007 Booklist
