A Different Drummer! The Girl Who Thought in Pictures--The Story of Dr. Temple Grandin by Julia Finley Mosca

If you have ever felt different,
If you have ever felt low;

If you don't quite fit in,
There's a name you should know:

Temple Grandin!

Temple Grandin's parents happily welcomed her birth, but from the beginning, Temple was different. She hated her frilly but itchy baby dresses and like to twirl herself around and around in circles. She couldn't bear loud sounds and she didn't learn to speak until she was three. Busy places stressed her out and tantrums followed, so she didn't fit in at school at all.

But Temple's mother never gave up on her. She took her to doctors who at last came to a conclusion.

That thing with her brain?
It was autism, you see.

She was different, not less.
They all finally agreed.

Temple learned to read and write, but the best thing that happened was when her mother sent her out west to live on a ranch with her aunt. Temple learned that she understood the animals--the horses, the pigs, and the cattle--and they understood her. She realized that she thought like they did--in pictures! And suddenly she knew that her life's work was to be with animals. And with that self-knowledge, she eagerly returned to school and studied animal science, and at last found herself a teacher, a university professor teaching students about farm animals herself.

Julia Finley Mosca's picture book biography, The Girl Who Thought in Pictures: The Story of Dr. Temple Grandin (Amazing Scientists) (Innovation Press, 2017) offers young readers an insight into the fact that not everyone thinks and understands the world in the same way, while describing how Temple Grandin used her special empathy for animals to make her own career and to find ways to handle animals humanely and with understanding. With the assistance of the artwork of Daniel Rieley, Mosca's biography paints a picture of a notable "cowgirl," lecturer, and woman scientist whose novel ways of thinking about the way we deal with animals shows the value of different ways of seeing the world.

So unique are our minds,

It take brains of all kinds!

For elementary-grade readers, the author offers selected back matter, including a conversation with Grandin, a timeline of her career, a bibliograpy containing books, videos, and web links, and a thumbnail summary of the facts of her life, a useful appendix for biography book reports.

For more information about this unusual scientist, see also noted science writer Sy Montgomery's Temple Grandin: How the Girl Who Loved Cows Embraced Autism and Changed the World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). (Read my review here.)

"Not a Disney Story": Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption by Ralph James Savarese

Yesterday I heard a mesmorizing interview with Ralph Savarese, whose book Reasonable People is subtitled A Memoir of Autism and Adoption: On the Meaning of Family and the Politics of Neurological Difference. Although the title refects the complexity and intense debate currently surrounding the education of autistic children, Savarese's story was such a gripping one that I rearranged my plans to hear it out.

Savarese, a professor of American literature at Grinnell College, and his wife, a professional in the field of autism, had no plans to have children when she encountered D.J. at the age of two and a half years. Even though D.J. had been deserted by his parents and abused in the foster system, the couple were drawn to him by some intangible thread which finally led them to adopt, a process which took over three years. D. J. was totally non-verbal and obviously disturbed by the experiences of his short life, but the Savareses threw themselves into learning how to help him. The breakthrough for D.J. was through the controversial technique of computer-facilitated communication, in which the computer speaks the words he types. Now in early adolescence, D. J. still speaks only a few words but is an outstanding student and writes fluently, even adding his own chapter to the book.

"This is not a Disney story," Savarese honestly admits. But if the book is as riveting as the hour-long interview I heard, it is well worth reading for its insight into the role of nurture and communication in the human story and should be invaluable to parents and others working with autistic children.

Interestingly, one of this year's Newbery Honor books, Rules, reviewed here along with another Newbery winner in my post of February 18, also deals honestly with autism from the viewpoint of an older sibling.