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A review by michelleful
Autism by Uta Frith
3.0
I wanted an overview of current-ish theories of autism and the desiderata for what we would want such a theory to explain, and I more or less got it in this book.
It did have flaws as others have pointed out, though I think a lot of it was simply pushback against a very extreme, probably straw-man neuro-diversity position by pointing out that families of some individuals with severe autism are very adversely affected by it. She does take pains also to point out that many people with autism find ways to cope with it, function socially, and be happy.
Her description of the various theories tends to be rather hand-wavy and imprecise (like the one about the Self, as if capitalising the first letter gives it any predictive power at all), which I didn't care for, but I think a lot of that reflects the state of the playing field and how little we know about autism at all. I was glad that she was upfront about what things we aren't sure of (basically everything, except that autism isn't caused by vaccines).
It did have flaws as others have pointed out, though I think a lot of it was simply pushback against a very extreme, probably straw-man neuro-diversity position by pointing out that families of some individuals with severe autism are very adversely affected by it. She does take pains also to point out that many people with autism find ways to cope with it, function socially, and be happy.
Her description of the various theories tends to be rather hand-wavy and imprecise (like the one about the Self, as if capitalising the first letter gives it any predictive power at all), which I didn't care for, but I think a lot of that reflects the state of the playing field and how little we know about autism at all. I was glad that she was upfront about what things we aren't sure of (basically everything, except that autism isn't caused by vaccines).