Not Even Wrong, Paul Collins
Not Even Wrong, Paul Collins
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Not Even Wrong
A Father’s Journey into the Lost History of Autism

Author: Paul Collins

Narrator: Tim Getman

Unabridged: 6 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/26/2022

Synopsis

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.

About Paul Collins

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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Krom

Ironically, this book provides for Autism what Autists themselves usually do not have - context. And by using historical explorations along with anecdotes relating to the author's own experience, I finally felt as if, for the first time, I was getting my head around this topic in a way that made sen......more

Goodreads review by Astraea

This is a copy of my review from amazon.com. Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism was written by historian Paul Collins, the author of Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books. His son Morgan bounces around exuberantly playing verbal games with numbers and letters, banging on the piano, reading everyt......more

Goodreads review by Valarie

Though I am often wary of "memoirs of autism" written by neurotypical adults, this book is an exception. Collins struggles to understand his child, not as someone who is "trapped" in a disorder, but simply someone who sees the world in a completely different and useful way. Though there are many soc......more

Goodreads review by Yavien

We, autistic people, usually have an allergic reaction to "autism moms/dads" and their testaments. So I was really surprised when I saw a quote that hit close to home about autism and figured out it came from what seemed a memoir of a father of an infant, then toddler autistic kid. I gave this book......more

Quotes

“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 Fair

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