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Reasonable People: a Memoir of Autism and Adoption
by
Ralph James Savarese.
_________________
Reviews:
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Body + Soul Magazine
Reasonable People: A Memoir of
Autism & Adoption
is poet Ralph James Savarese's tale of adopting
an abused, non-speaking boy, then using love and patience
to help his son grow into his full self. A moving
memoir, it calls for "living with conviction
in a cynical time."
From Publishers
Weekly
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. Publishers Weekly
(May) Copyright © Reed Business Information,
a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
By his own admission, Grinnell
professor Savarese never wanted to have children,
which makes his memoir of his and wife Emily's
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 couldn't 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. Savarese's careful melding of memoir and
passionate advocacy for the disabled informs and
inspires. Donna Chavez Copyright © American
Library Association. All rights reserved
from GQ. The
Essentials: May.07
What everyone should be talking about.... Why
Ralph James Savarese and his wife would adopt a 6-year-old
with autism is the subject of the new memoir REASONABLE
PEOPLE. That it manages to avoid both polemic and
cliche is reason enough to applaud.
From Autismland
A black hole.
That is the image that
Ralph Savarese opens his forthcoming book Reasonable
People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption with. He writes:
To many experts, the non-speaking Autist resembles the
old version of a black hole: swallowing everything, emitting
nothing; forever hidden, never to be revealed.
To be autistic and
to be non-verbal was once, Savarese suggests, to be
a kind of human black hole, a bottomless,
empty, mysterious nothingness that took in information
and stimuli and never did anything it. And this is, I suspect
and I know, how my son, Charlie, would have been regarded
had he been born fifty years ago, forty, twenty;
and this is how DJ, Savarese’s adopted autistic
son, might still be regarded had he not been taught to
type the words inside of him.
Savarese’s book Reasonable People: A Memoir of
Autism and Adoption tells many stories: How DJ came
into his parents-to-be’s lives in Florida; how
DJ suffered in the “care” of a foster
parent; how Savarese becomes a father; how 9-year-old
DJ, after several years of hand-over-hand typing, emerges into “full-blown
communication.” DJ is now a straight-A honor roll
student in middle school in a town in south-central
Iowa. And DJ wrote the final chapter (”It’s
My Story”) of Savarese’s book Reasonable
People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption. Just because
a child—an autistic child—cannot speak, cannot
express himself orally—-does not mean that he cannot
speak, as this book by Savarese and by DJ shows.
The black hole is not so bleak, not so silent, after
all.
Savarese, who teaches
American literature and creative writing at Grinnell College, begins Reasonable People:
A Memoir of Autism and Adoption by describing the
new version of the black hole: Rather than swallowing
up all particles, all information, forever, black
holes are now said to allow information to escape.
Savarese quotes no less an expert on these matters than
physicist Stephen Hawking—-indeed, he refers to
an incident in July of 2004, in which Hawking officially
conceded a bet to his Cal-Tech colleague, John Preskill. "As
the headline from the Technology and Science page of
the MSNBC website put it, 'Hawking changes his mind
on black holes: Galactic traps may actually allow
information to escape.' At the 17th International Conference
on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, Ireland,
Hawking presented Preskill with a book: Total Baseball,
The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia. In doing so,
the world’s most famous physicist mocked his own theory
with an object from which, in the words of one reporter, “information is
easily retrieved.”
Savarese’s Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism
and Adoption is a gripping narrative of how DJ came
into his and his wife Emily’s life, of how autism came
into his life; of how a child who many “experts” had
written off, has himself learned to write and can
tell his own story. --Kristina Chew
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