Published on 12, July, 2020
Has anyone read this or listened to it on Audiobook?
I'm trying to get through it on audio book at the moment. Christ it's long winded though , and goes into quite a bit of unnecessary and irrelevant waffly details. In my opinion. I sometimes loose the thread, and the point of what he is trying to say, due to it being so very rambly.
There does seem to be a lot of important knowledge contained amongst all of the waffle though, so I am sticking with it, although it is testing my patience to it's limit.
The section on Asperger and the Eugenics movement has provided a lot of background info and context.. The story that some people are portraying on Youtube as to the reasons why people no longer refer to Asperger's syndrome by that name, as due to him being responsible for the life and death decisions at the Nazi concentration camps, does not seem to be quite as simple as they are portraying it to be.
The audio book has been split into 20 parts, probably about 15 hours total listen time. I'm up to part 11, and will continue with it this afternoon as I get through my weeks worth of dishwashing and other household chores.
I read it and found it fascinating and illuminating as a history of psychiatry and how we got where we are. It's a kind of three-way comparison of ideas of autism between Kanner, Asperger and autistic people themselves. It's nothing like a self-help book, but rather I found it useful in explaining why psychiatrists think what they do about autistic people.
Certain sections of the edition I read seemed to partially excuse Hans Asperger, since Silberman didn't have all the historical evidence that came to light in the last couple of years that Asperger collaborated and sent many autistic children to their deaths.
All the same Silberman is a good journalist and a good autistic ally and the book provided me with a primer that could be used as a starting point for investigating or thinking through more accurate views of autism (eg monotropism).