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A remarkable, elegantly written portrait of four autistic men and women, and what their struggles and triumphs reveal about this baffling condition, and about us all.
Bloomsbury Publishing
April 2006
224 pages ISBN: 1582346194 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
In 1982, when he was four years old, Kamran Nazeer was
enrolled in a small school in New York City alongside a
dozen other children diagnosed with autism. Calling
themselves the Idiots, these kids received care that was at
the cutting edge of developmental psychology. Twenty-three
years later, the school no longer exists. Send in the Idiots is the always candid, often surprising,
and ultimately moving investigation into what happened to
those children. Now a policy adviser in England, Kamran
decides to visit four of his old classmates to find out the
kind of lives that they are living now, how much they’ve
been able to overcome—and what remains missing. A
speechwriter unable to make eye contact; a messenger who
gets upset if anyone touches his bicycle; a depressive
suicide victim; and a computer engineer who communicates
difficult emotions through the use of hand puppets: these
four classmates reveal an astonishing, thought-provoking
spectrum of behavior. Bringing to life the texture of autistic lives and the
pressures and limitations that the condition presents,
Kamran also relates the ways in which those can be eased
over time, and with the right treatment. Using his own
experiences to examine such topics as the difficulties of
language, conversation as performance, and the politics of
civility, Send in the Idiots is also a rare and provocative
exploration of the way that people—all people—learn to think
and feel. Written with unmatched insight and striking
personal testimony, Kamran Nazeer’s account is a stunning,
invaluable, and utterly unique contribution to the
literature of what makes us human.
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