The author was stunned at his two year old son’s routine physical exam when the doctor recommended that his son be tested for a cognitive disability. That life-changing news for any parent is part of the story he weaves of his son’s home life and early intervention at school with his travels and investigations into the history of autism.

For me, one of the two most notable parts of the book was his visit with Simon Baron-Cohen, the Director of Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. Baron-Cohen was the first to use the Sally-Anne Test, which reveals what he calls “mind-blindness”, autism’s defining characteristic: the lack of a theory of mind. Most autistic children have difficulty with social communication and cannot conceive of the mental states in other people; unable to understand the intention of deception. They do not distinguish between their own minds and other people’s, and the notion that someone else might be thinking different thoughts or seeing things differently does not occur to them.

And also, this finding, when one thousand British parents of autistic children were surveyed, the children proved to have fathers working in engineering at double the national rate.  Other solitary professions requiring deep focus and abstraction --- science, accounting and artists showed even higher results.

This book is an easy read; an introduction to autism without the discussion of its possible genetic and environmental causes.