Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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A gateway in more ways than one (CBR12Bingo: Gateway)

Be Different by John Elder Robison

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I’m a big believer in an introduction not being anyone’s best work necessarily, you want to hook a reader but not give all of the wonder of future works away. My favorite Robison book is either Look Me In The Eye, his debut; or possibly Switched On, but this is a solid start for anyone interested in either book. Interestingly, Look Me In The Eye was more of a memoir with a mystery – Robison details his experience with what was then called Asperger’s (a […]

I bet that golden ticket makes the chocolate taste terrible

Switched On by John Elder Robison

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The elevator pitch for this book is “Awakenings for Autism,” but it’s obviously more than that. John Robison is pretty up front about – well, everything because of that aforementioned Autism, but more importantly – becoming the voice of high functioning Autism (previously Asperger’s) by virtue of having written a memoir and without any scientific background in neuroscience. Which isn’t entirely fair, because Look Me In the Eye is an exceptionally well crafted memoir that gives the reader a sense of how Robison thinks, not […]

About that time I hung a mannequin from the power line…

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Recently, someone has come in to my life who was diagnosed with Asperger’s a few years ago. At his urging to “read a little about it”, I picked up Look Me In the Eye at the public library. (Side note: I am shocked at how little there is out there about this condition.) John Elder Robison is the brother of Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors, Dry), and while I vaguely remember Robison from Burroughs’ memoirs, he reminds the reader that he and his brother had “different parents”, and […]



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