An authentic, engaging, and informative look at an autistic woman’s inner world.
An autistic woman explains how her condition shapes her world in Kotowicz’s nonfiction debut.
The author blends autobiography and health reporting as she describes her own experience with autism and offers a perspective on how neurotypical people can best interact with, support, and love the autistic people in their lives. Kotowicz, who received her diagnosis as an adult, explains how she came to understand that she experienced sensations, processed thoughts, and managed her physical and emotional needs differently from the nonautistic people around her. The book addresses theories of autism, common misunderstandings of autistic behavior, and strategies for both autistic and neurotypical people to use to improve their interactions. The concluding chapter is optimistic, focusing on the ways in which the author has embraced her neurological differences, framing them as core aspects of her identity rather than problems to be fixed. Although the chapter subtitles (“How I Take It All In,” “How I Reach a Tipping Point,” “How My Heart Is Healing”) make it clear that Kotowicz’s individual experience forms this well-told and compelling narrative’s core, she describes situations and experiences that are common among people with autism. The book’s dual nature, functioning as both personal history and informational guide, works well, universalizing an individual story while also focusing on the unique details. The author does an excellent job of discussing autism without pathologizing it. Kotowicz is particularly skilled at breaking down her experiences into their fundamental elements and discussing underlying causes, as when she explains that she was able to manage a sensitivity to rain by understanding that, although raindrops caused her no harm, the pain they produced was a valid feeling that she could only process once she acknowledged its existence. The book makes a solid case for developing a global sense of empathy: “Be mindful that someone’s internal state may be different than you expect, and different than you’d feel if you were acting like them.”
An authentic, engaging, and informative look at an autistic woman’s inner world.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2022
ISBN: 9798986482729
Page Count: 118
Publisher: Neurobeautiful
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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