shopping cart
Call us: 800-878-7323 HELP
McAfee SECURE helps keep you safe from identity theft, credit card fraud, spyware, spam, viruses and online scams.
Original Essays | October 18, 2009

Victoria Hislop: IMG From Leprosy to Lorca — Strange Inspiration

0 comments By Victoria Hislop

My first novel, The Island, was inspired by a chance visit to a tiny island leper colony off the coast of Greece on our summer holiday. It was a... Continue »
  1. $10.49 Sale Trade Paper add to wish list

    The Return

    Victoria Hislop

Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant

by Daniel Tammet

Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Born on a Blue Day is a journey into one of the most fascinating minds alive today — guided by the owner himself. Daniel Tammet is virtually unique among people who have severe autistic disorders in that he is capable of living a fully independent life and able to explain what is happening inside his head.

He sees numbers as shapes, colors, and textures, and he can perform extraordinary calculations in his head. He can learn to speak new languages fluently, from scratch, in a week. In 2004, he memorized and recited more than 22,000 digits of pi, setting a record. He has savant syndrome, an extremely rare condition that gives him the most unimaginable mental powers, much like those portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the film Rain Man.

Fascinating and inspiring, Born on a Blue Day explores what it' s like to be special and gives us an insight into what makes us all human — our minds.

Review:

"Artists and poets would give their best simile to perceive things with the same kind of vividness...For anyone interested in the workings of a truly 'beautiful mind,' Born on a Blue Day is a banquet."

— Minneapolis Star Tribune

Review:

"Tammet, now 28, manages the feat of introspection — and self-insight. His book brims with humanity. His approach is honest, eloquent, at times funny, and completely free of pity."

— The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Review:

"With all due respect to Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and any living Nobel laureates, the most remarkable mind on the planet just might belong to DanielTammet...Tammet displays a surprising level of sensitivity — and a refreshing lack of sentimentality — in an account that inspires even as it astonishes."

— Entertainment Weekly

Review:

"Remarkable, revealing, and nearly flawless."

— The Raleigh NewsandObserver

Synopsis:

One of the worlds only 50 living autistic savants is the first to tell his compelling and inspiring life story, and explain how his incredible mind works. While Tammets brain has amazed scientists for years, readers will be moved by this remarkable mans story.
back to top

What Our Readers Are Saying

Add a comment for a chance to win!
Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
Shoshana, November 15, 2008 (view all comments by Shoshana)
Tammet describes his life as a child and adolescent with undiagnosed Asperger's. He was later identified as a person with mathematical savantism, rare in people with generally normal cognitive skills. I was fascinated by Tammet's descriptions of how he learns and the role synesthesia plays in his recall. I do not have Asperger's, but aspects of Tammet's descriptions are very familiar to me, particularly when he discusses language acquisition. (Like a certain number of adolescents, I also memorized a hunk of pi, though only to 100 places. Like Tammet, I have favorite sections.)

What I'd really enjoy is to see Tammet's draft of a section before editing. I'm very curious about the extent to which he and other authors in the autistic spectrum are able to imagine a reader's interests and present their thoughts so that another person could easily engage with them. I always wonder to what extent editing in the direction of psychological connection with the reader may mask an autistic way of telling the story.

I won't list the growing body of writing by people with autistic spectrum disorders. Send me a note if you'd like recommendations. Given Tammet's conjecture that an early episode of epilepsy may be responsible for his savantism, this would be interesting to read with Taylor's My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, where the brain damage caused by the author's stroke caused the expression of typically-suppressed functions opf other areas of the brain.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No
(4 of 6 readers found this comment helpful)
report this comment
back to top

Product Details

ISBN:
9781416549017
Subtitle:
Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant
Author:
Tammet, Daniel
Publisher:
Free Press
Subject:
Specific Groups - Special Needs
Subject:
Personal Memoirs
Subject:
Psychopathology - Autism
Copyright:
2006
Edition Description:
Trade paper
Publication Date:
January 2006
Binding:
Paperback
Grade Level:
General/trade
Language:
English
Pages:
237
Dimensions:
8.44x5.72x.65 in. .52 lbs.
back to top

Other books you might like

  1. $10.50 Used Trade Paper add to wish list

    Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's

    John Elder Robison
  2. $6.00 Used Hardcover add to wish list

    Wish I Could Be There: Notes From a Phobic Life

    Allen Shawn
  3. $13.99 New Hardcover add to wish list

    The Boy Who Ate Stars

    Kochka
  4. $9.50 Used Trade Paper add to wish list

    The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales

    Oliver Sacks
  5. $8.95 Used Trade Paper add to wish list

    Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from My Life with Autism

    Temple Grandin
  6. $66.75 New Hardcover add to wish list

    Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses - Second Edition

    Richard E. Cytowic
back to top

Related Aisles

  • back to top

Powell's City of Books is an independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, that fills a whole city block with more than a million new, used, and out of print books. Shop those shelves — plus literally millions more books, DVDs, and eBooks — here at Powells.com.