Overview

Karl Taro Greenfeld's brother Noah was not like other babies. He couldn't crawl, he couldn't speak, he had trouble making eye contact and interacting with his family members. Karl knew his brother wasn't normal and his parents knew something was wrong with their younger son but no one - not doctors, specialists, or social workers - could say what exactly was the problem with Noah. As Noah got older, his differences became more pronounced. He never developed the skills of self-sufficiency that other children learn, and as a young boy he was unable to tie his own shoes, use the toilet, or verbally communicate. Noah also became prone to violence, both towards himself and others. He spat and clawed at eyes and pulled hair, and as he grew older he began to inflict physical harm on himself by scratching, hitting himself, and endlessly banging his head against hard surfaces. Noah's parents, Josh Greenfeld and Foumiko Kometani, dedicated their lives to caring for their boy. But Boy Alone is not the story of Noah; it is the story Karl, who spent his childhood and his life in the shadow of autism, tending to the needs of a disabled sibling while trying to determine his own needs and his own path. Boy Alone is an examination of two lives - Karl's and Noah's - and an investigation into what 'a life' really means. Can consciousness exist without self-consciousness? Can consciousness exist without language? What caused Noah's autism and can the effects be reversed? At the same time, the family of an autistic child is forced to confront more practical questions of existence: how do aging parents care for a nonverbal, often violent grown man? Of all the methods for 'dealing with' autism-multivitamin therapy, Operant Conditioning, Facilitation, Behaviorism, Freudian psychoanalyses, mainstreaming-is there anything that can be done to help an autistic child or adult become a member of mainstream society?

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9780061136665

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Reviews

Gripping. -- Suki Casanave, Washington Post

Gripping. --Suki Casanave, Washington Post

A wrenching account of growing up with a profoundly autistic younger brother.Journalist Greenfeld (China Syndrome: The True Story of the 21st-Century's First Great Epidemic<\i>, 2006, etc.) is the brother of Noah, for a time the best-known autistic child in the country. In a trilogy of books about Noah by their father Josh - beginning in 1972 with A Child Called Noah<\i> - the author is a bit player who provides interesting contrast to his autistic brother but little more than that. Here, Greenfeld begins with his early memories as a toddler in the mid '60s. In 1971 the family moved from New York to California in a desperate search for help for Noah. The author then jumps ahead to his adolescent years in Pacific Palisades, where he, with his Japanese mother, Jewish father and a bizarrely behaving, disabled kid brother, was a social misfit. While the author got involved in petty crime, drugs and imaginary war games, family life revolved around Noah, whom he both resented and loved. Eventually Greenfeld and his parents moved to a new house, leaving Noah in their old one with a caretaker. With the new arrangement, Noah began to recede from his life, and Greenfeld began his own rocky climb to maturity. Memoir turns smoothly to fictional imagining in the later sections as the author thinks about Noah transforming into a brother who can talk to him and share experiences. But in the final pages he abruptly shifts back to harsh reality. Woven into this moving personal story is an account of the changing scientific approaches to autism, from Bruno Bettelheim's claim that cold mothers were the cause and the key to treatment, to the adherents of B.F. Skinner, who saw operant conditioning as the answer. With inadequate resources and conflicting research, parents of autistic children grasp at misleading claims. As Greenfeld makes clear, while early intervention may help the very young, for autistic adults, like his brother, the situation is exceedingly bleak.Greenfeld spares neither himself nor his brother in this painfully honest, revealing memoir. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Karl Taro Greenfeld is a journalist and author known for his articles on life in modern Asia and both his fiction and non-fiction in the Paris Review. He is currently a special contributor to Sports Illustrated, Portfolio and Details.

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