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Thinking in Pictures (Expanded, Tie-in Edition): My Life with Autism (Vintage)
by Temple Grandin

Published: 2010-01-26
Paperback : 304 pages
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Recommended to book clubs by 3 of 3 members
Temple Grandin, Ph.D., is a gifted animal scientist who has designed one-third of all the livestock-handling facilities in the United States. She also lectures widely on autism--because Temple Grandin is autistic, a woman who thinks, feels, and experiences the world in ways that are ...
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Introduction

Temple Grandin, Ph.D., is a gifted animal scientist who has designed one-third of all the livestock-handling facilities in the United States. She also lectures widely on autism--because Temple Grandin is autistic, a woman who thinks, feels, and experiences the world in ways that are incomprehensible to the rest of us.

In this unprecedented book, Grandin delivers a report from the country of autism. Writing from the dual perspectivies of a scientist and an autistic person, she tells us how that country is experienced by its inhabitants and how she managed to breach its boundaries to function in the outside world. What emerges in Thinking in Pictures is the document of an extraordinary human being, one who, in gracefully and lucidly bridging the gulf between her condition and our own, sheds light on the riddle of our common identity.

Editorial Review

Oliver Sacks calls Temple Grandin's first book--and the first picture of autism from the inside--"quite extraordinary, unprecedented and, in a way, unthinkable." Sacks told part of her story in his An Anthropologist on Mars, and in Thinking in Pictures Grandin returns to tell her life history with great depth, insight, and feeling. Grandin told Sacks, "I don't want my thoughts to die with me. I want to have done something ... I want to know that my life has meaning ... I'm talking about things at the very core of my existence." Grandin's clear exposition of what it is like to "think in pictures" is immensely mind-broadening and basically destroys a whole school of philosophy (the one that declares language necessary for thought). Grandin, who feels she can "see through a cow's eyes," is an influential designer of slaughterhouses and livestock restraint systems. She has great insight into human-animal relations. It would be mere justice if Thinking in Pictures transforms the study of religious feeling, too.

Excerpt

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Discussion Questions

Suggested by Members

What recourse do parents have for a severely autistic child today besides institutionalization?
How many forms of Autism are there?
by greenwave (see profile) 09/10/14

Notes From the Author to the Bookclub

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Book Club Recommendations

Great insight into Autism
by greenwave (see profile) 09/10/14
I would suggest that readers read the book, then view the movie and invite a parent of an Autistic child to share as we did. So insightful!

Member Reviews

Overall rating:
 
 
  "Thinking in Pictures"by Barbara D. (see profile) 09/10/14

Book is very clinical. A viewing of the HBO movie, questions with the mother of an autistic child and comments from a special needs educator, helped us all achieve a better understanding of the disability.... (read more)

 
  "Thinking in Pictures"by Sandra D. (see profile) 09/10/14

We all read at least part of the book to start then it became so clinical that we rented the movie, invited the community, then viewed it at our Life Span Center Theater. Wonderful way to understand... (read more)

 
by Ardis L. (see profile) 09/10/14

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