When Paul Collins’s son Morgan was two years old, he could read, spell, and perform multiplication tables in his head … but not answer to his own name. A casual conversation—or any social interaction that the rest of us take for granted—will, for Morgan, always be a cryptogram that must be painstakingly decoded. He lives in a world of his own: an autistic world.
In Not Even Wrong, Paul Collins melds a memoir of his son’s autism with a journey into this realm of permanent outsiders. Examining forgotten geniuses and obscure medical archives, Collins’s travels take him from an English churchyard to the Seattle labs of Microsoft, and from a Wisconsin prison cell block to the streets of Vienna. It is a story that reaches from a lonely clearing in the Black Forest into the London palace of King George I, from Defoe and Swift to the discovery of evolution; from the modern dawn of the computer revolution to, in the end, the author’s own household.
Not Even Wrong is a haunting journey into the borderlands of neurology—a meditation on what “normal” is, and how human genius comes to us in strange and wondrous forms.
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“A thoroughly touching and engaging look at autism through the ages, told from the perspective of a loving father.”
— Booklist
“Striking…Brave man, brave book.”
— Washington Post“Collins elucidates, with great compassion, what it means to be ‘normal’ and what it means to be human.”
— Los Angeles Times“Brilliant.”
— Vanity FairBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Paul Collins is an author specializing in science writing, magazine writing, history, and memoir; his books have appeared in a dozen languages. He is the recipient of an Oregon Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and teaches in the Creative Writing program at Portland State University.