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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Suggested Age | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Cabell County Public Library | 921 MUKHOPADHYAY M | Adult | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Gallaher Village Public Library | 921 MUKHOPADHYAY M | Adult | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Milton Public Library | 921 MUKHOPADHYAY M | Adult | Searching... Unknown |
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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.
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
Table of Contents
| Foreword | p. xi |
| Author's Note | p. xv |
| Through the Mirror | p. 1 |
| The Color of Basic Words | p. 4 |
| The Color of My Scream | p. 6 |
| Following the Belief | p. 10 |
| What Could the Upstairs Mirror Tell the Handheld Mirror? | p. 15 |
| No Wonder I Don't Talk! | p. 17 |
| Shadows Don't Tell Stories | p. 20 |
| Flapping My Hands, Flapping My Shadow | p. 23 |
| Autism! A Fancy Word | p. 26 |
| Shadows the Color of My Scream! | p. 29 |
| Tracing the Shape of Shadows and Trapping Them in Place | p. 31 |
| My Story Forms around Staircases | p. 35 |
| Railway Staircases | p. 37 |
| Why Was Mother Stopping Me from Climbing? | p. 40 |
| Those Building Blocks | p. 43 |
| I No Longer Need to Climb | p. 46 |
| Escalator Ride | p. 47 |
| The Power to Control Darkness and Light | p. 51 |
| Unpredictability | p. 56 |
| The Power of a Ceiling Fan to Make Me Feel Sure | p. 59 |
| Power Outages Happened, Despite the Moving Fan | p. 63 |
| Power Outages Followed through My Older Years | p. 66 |
| Feeding My Body | p. 70 |
| "Wish He Could Dress Himself" | p. 73 |
| When Learning Turns to Obsession | p. 76 |
| The Torn Shirts | p. 79 |
| Walking in My Shoes | p. 84 |
| A Grip on the Shoelaces | p. 88 |
| "How Do You Perceive a Linear Situation?" | p. 93 |
| Perceiving a Nonlinear Situation, with Unpredictable Results | p. 97 |
| In a Crowded Place | p. 100 |
| On a Swing | p. 103 |
| Perceiving Faces | p. 105 |
| Everyday Faces | p. 110 |
| Magazine Pictures | p. 112 |
| Exposure Helps Shape Visual Perception | p. 115 |
| When I Think of the Wind, I Am the Wind | p. 118 |
| Overperceiving and Underperceiving | p. 121 |
| Why Couldn't I Draw a Sun? | p. 125 |
| A Game of Catch | p. 129 |
| Ball-Man | p. 133 |
| "What's Going On Here?" | p. 136 |
| Scattered Senses | p. 139 |
| The Boy Who Does Not Talk but Solves Jigsaw Puzzles | p. 143 |
| "Who Knows What I Had Written Down as My Answer to 4 + 2 = ?" | p. 154 |
| Learning to Write | p. 157 |
| Divine Phenomenon! | p. 166 |
| Writing Down Dictated Words | p. 169 |
| It Worked Better than a School | p. 174 |
| Struggling Our Way Out of a Belief System | p. 176 |
| "I Need You to Prescribe Me Some Medicine" | p. 179 |
| Obsessions to Count | p. 185 |
| Power Outage in the Metro Rail | p. 191 |
| Reaching the Other End | p. 195 |
| "Tell Us What He Was Reading" | p. 200 |
| Why Factual Memory Is Safer than Episodic Memory | p. 204 |
| Talking about Memories | p. 206 |
| How Do I Recall? | p. 208 |
| Am I in Pain? | p. 209 |
| Final Words | p. 212 |
