by Roy Richard Grinker; New York, Basic Books, 2006, 340 pages,
$26.95 Dr. Dvir is affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry,
University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester.
Unstrange," a neologism coined by the poet E. E. Cummings, is
very appropriately used in the title of this book. As Roy
Richard Grinker states in his introduction, "the process of
understanding autism itself parallels the work that
anthropologists do, since the minds of people with autism are
sometimes as hard to understand as foreign cultures." Grinker is
a professor of anthropology at George Washington University and
is interested in the intersection between culture and illness.
He is also the father of a daughter with autism. In this
beautifully written, captivating book, Grinker looks at autism
from a cultural viewpoint and observes how culture dictates the
way we view autism. He examines the historical events leading to
the current rise in the prevalence of autism and critically
inspects the available evidence. "Is there re