Temple Grandin, Ph.D. is a gifted animal scientist. She also lectures widely on autism because she is autistic. And kudos to her, Grandin was the Grandmother of books on autistic women and an #actuallyautistic author. In this book, Grandin writes from her perspective as a scientist and as an autistic person. She tells us how she manages her autism to function in the outside world.
But I found this to be a difficult and tedious read. While I admire Grandin for her courage and determination in pursuing her education and career goals, I find her style of writing to be all over the place, incoherent rambling, which is difficult to follow. In addition, she makes sweeping generalizations about autistic people, based on her own personal experience. She has a strange affect of tone that I found flat and almost mechanical in her writing style.
What she fails to realize is that not all autistic people are like her. Not all autistic people are 'visual thinkers'. On the Autism Spectrum, there are 3 attributed styles; visual, verbal, maths/science. As someone that is a 'Verbal Thinker', this book was an absolute nightmare for me. A cow is a cow. I see a generic black and white cow and that's it. I don't need 5 pages of descriptions, illustrations nor photographs.
I was expecting more of a memoir, but this is really about Grandin's opinion on different aspects of autism with her own experiences sprinkled in. It was difficult to get through the more technical aspects of the book and it was frustrating how often information was repeated. What did come through in her actual memoir bits, was how lucky she was with her mother and teachers. Back in the 60's, her mother nurtured her, she was never described as a SEND child/adolescent. Her intellect was acknowledged and encouraged. Plus, her mother had money to buy things like extra tuition, private tutors etc. But on the other hand, she never taught Temple about deodorant. That makes no sense to me.
The original title for this book was 'A Cow's Eye View', and once you read this book, you'll know why. She gives plenty of examples from her own life to illustrate her points, and the book has a number of photographs of Grandin from childhood to womanhood. And cows. Lots of cows. By now, I'm fed up with the cows.
One interesting area was where Grandin tries to explain the various drugs; antidepressants, anticonvulsants, corticosteroids, etc. that have been used to treat ASD. Unfortunately, studies are cited, but at the end of the book, so good luck having the patience trying to match the study to what she has written! Also, her information is incredibly out of date, even in the updated 2006 edition, the newest study cited was from 2004.
Temple Grandin may well think in pictures, but she hasn't mastered the written word for a 'verbal thinker'.
Saskia
As someone who tends to spot small visual details that others seem to miss, I was intrigued to find out if I also had visual thinking like Temple Grandin or another thinking style. Sadly, Grandin's description of the other thinking styles is very limited and even her description of the visual thinking style is confined to her own experience. So I'm not much closer to figuring out what my thinking style is.
Unlike Carmen, I enjoyed the parts where Grandin talks about animal science and her engineering design job, this was the part I preferred out of this somewhat confusing book.
Despite the gap in time and background, I did weirdly resonate with some of her educational proposals like the one about taking kids on school trip to various industrial facilities.
I also found her discussion of religion rather interesting as she put it in the context of what she was taught by others (her family, Sunday school etc.) as well as how her autism and visual thinking have influenced her beliefs over time.
Ultimately though, I found the constant mix of deeply medicalised and deficit based language with Grandin's clearly supportive autistic views puzzling.
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