Synopses & Reviews
When Paul Collins's son Morgan was two years old, he could read, spell, and perform multiplication tables in his head...but not answer to his own name. A casual conversation-or any social interaction that the rest of us take for granted-will, for Morgan, always be a cryptogram that must be painstakingly decoded. He lives in a world of his own: an autistic world.
In Not Even Wrong, Paul Collins melds a memoir of his son's autism with a journey into this realm of permanent outsiders. Examining forgotten geniuses and obscure medical archives, Collins's travels take him from an English churchyard to the Seattle labs of Microsoft, and from a Wisconsin prison cell block to the streets of Vienna. It is a story that reaches from a lonely clearing in the Black Forest into the London palace of King George I, from Defoe and Swift to the discovery of evolution; from the modern dawn of the computer revolution to, in the end, the author's own household.
Not Even Wrong is a haunting journey into the borderlands of neurology - a meditation on what "normal" is, and how human genius comes to us in strange and wondrous forms.
Review
"This is a smart, compassionate study of autists 'the ultimate square pegs' and how they see the world, darkly, through the thickets of their own genius." Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
Collins melds a memoir of his son's autism with a haunting journey into the borderlands of neurology a meditation on what "normal" is, and how human genius comes in strange and wondrous forms.
Synopsis
In
Not Even Wrong, Paul Collins melds a memoir of his son's autism with a journey into this realm of permanent outsiders. Examining forgotten geniuses and obscure medical archives, and beginning to see why he himself has spent a lifetime researching talented eccentrics, Collins shows how these stories are relevant and even necessary to shed light on autism.
About the Author
Paul Collins is the author of
Sixpence House and
Banvard's Folly. He edits the
Collins Library for McSweeney's Books, and his work has appeared in
New Scientist, Business 2.0, and
Tin House.