Reasonable People

February 5, 2007
Savarese, a writer and professor at Grinnell College, writes a moving account of his family's adoption of DJ, an abused, autistic youngster. Throughout, he describes the process of helping DJ communicate with the world and discusses larger issues of the rights of people with neurological differences. Savarese's wife, an autism professional, first encountered DJ when he was only two and a half; by the time they could adopt him, three years later, he'd lived in several homes and been badly abused in foster care. Because he didn't speak, people were unaware of what he'd suffered; some doubted he even could suffer, believing the myth that the autistic have no sense of self or others. As the Savareses worked with their son, teaching him to sign and to use "facilitated communication" with a keyboard, they learned more about his very deep thoughts and feelings. As they fought to include him in mainstream classrooms, they also struggled with his emerging demons: his memories of abuse, his pain from parental abandonment. Savarese writes with passion and humor, careful to include extensive excerpts from DJ's typing, so readers get a sense of his remarkable growth.

March 1, 2007
A controversial therapy for autism, facilitated communication (FC) first gained attention in the early 1990s but was discredited because of the indeterminable influence of the facilitator. It most commonly involves guiding the hands of an autistic person over a keyboard to help him/her type out messages. The father of a severely autistic teenage son, Savarese (literature, Grinnell Coll.) is a proponent of FC and offers a memoir both of his son's background and of his experience with the therapy. The best part of the book vividly chronicles the formerbefore being adopted, D.J. was abandoned by his birth parents and suffered abuse in the foster care system. Savarese then explores D.J.'s development using FC and includes phrases and passages he typed (the potential interference of the facilitator is not easy to ignore when we see, e.g., D.J. referring to his visit to Rome as a "trip of a lifetime"). While Savarese shows the positive aspects of FC, he fails to demonstrate in-depth how that method could be used by parents and educators. Nevertheless, readers will find the elements documenting the foster care system worthwhile. Recommended for academic libraries with comprehensive disability collections.Corey Seeman, Kresge Business Administration Lib., Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2007
By his own admission, Grinnell professor Savarese never wanted to have children, which makes his memoir of his and wife Emilys autistic adopted son, DJ, all the more poetic a demonstration of achieving much more than one thinks one can. This applies as much to DJ, whom Emily met while she was assistant director of a center for autism and related disabilities, as it does to the Savareses. At two and one-half, DJ couldnt talk, he perseverated (repeated actions), and was generally unresponsive. Worse, he had been neglected, abused, and abandoned when his birth parents and several foster parents wrote him off as too much to handle. Armed with clear principles on how children with autism ought to be cared for, Emily and Ralph started to work with DJ, eventually adopting him. Their road together continues to be rough, but today the preteen boy attends mainstream classes and, as the final, in-his-own-words chapter confirms, possesses marvelous perceptive and communicative skills. Savareses careful melding of memoir and passionate advocacy for the disabled informs and inspires.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)