Immersed: Our Experience with Autism

10/11/2016

https://amzn.com/B01G9IBSZC

Through vivid images and a candid narrative, parents describe the surreal experience of having twin sons with severe autism. From the introduction: Autism is not subtle. It is not vague. It pervades everything, surfaces everywhere. It blends into the woven strands of life, of reality, attaching itself so swiftly and completely that the entire world seems recast, reformed, reimagined, rewritten. No space, no concept is left untouched. 


From the back cover (by Dawn Hassett): Bruce Hall aims his camera at Jack and James and brings back photographs that are unflinchingly close and personal. Through his very specificity, he opens a wider window into a foreign realm-the deep internal experience of autism. This selection of images is from Hall's extended investigation of autism's roiling surface. But it may well be something scarcer in photography and in art-a study not of surface, but of great depth. 
Valerie Hall's episodic text chronicles Jack's and James's condition as it transforms family life and poses ominous implications for the future. Her reactions to her own life in a world where autism makes the rules are candid and unfiltered. She rejects the tropes of most autism literature, spurning both memoir and "how-to" prescriptions. Instead she invites you to encounter Jack and James as she does, as boys that are both beautiful and broken. The day-to-dayness of her account has the disturbing effect of allowing the reader to step into a world where expectations are upended and encounters take on an aura of the surreal. https://amzn.com/B01G9IBSZC

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