To understand the future of autism, take a trip to its past. In NeuroTribes, science writer Steve Silberman serves as a knowledgeable and evenhanded guide to the often dark history of autism. It's a sad, difficult story that Silberman confronts head-on. In a wide-ranging narrative, he describes desperate parents, children abandoned to grim institutions and experimental treatments that relied on starvation and abuse. He also describes the work of early clinicians who studied autistic children in the 1940s. Their piecemeal observations led to ongoing diagnostic wrangling that may be behind the recent seeming spike in autism cases, Silberman writes.
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