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.

Author Bio

Paul Collins is the author of eight books, including The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World and Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America’s First Sensational Murder Mystery, a finalist for the Edgar Award. He appears on NPR’s Weekend Edition as its “literary detective” on odd and forgotten books, and is the founder of the Collins Library imprint of McSweeney’s Books. Collins lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is an associate professor of English at Portland State University.

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