{"id":128,"date":"2006-05-21T08:11:01","date_gmt":"2006-05-21T15:11:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/?p=128"},"modified":"2007-09-30T11:34:59","modified_gmt":"2007-09-30T18:34:59","slug":"the-curious-incident","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/2006\/05\/the-curious-incident\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201c<\/span>The Curious Incident\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019d heard quite a lot about the book \u201cThe Curi\u00adous Incid\u00adent of the Dog in the Night-Time\u201d<\/a> by Mark Had\u00addon, but I tend to dis\u00adcount the breath\u00adless reviews in news\u00adpa\u00adpers and the like, since I find I often don\u2019t have any\u00adwhere near as high an opin\u00adion of any giv\u00aden book as review\u00aders do. But when a couple of blog\u00adgers I read recom\u00admen\u00added<\/a> it<\/a>, I decided it was prob\u00adably worth a try (thereby prov\u00ading the old adage about word of mouth being much more effect\u00adive than oth\u00ader forms of advert\u00adising). So when I was last in Oxford<\/a>, I picked it up in one of the 3\u2011for\u20112 Sum\u00admer Read\u00ading sales. And promptly decided it was worth read\u00ading, and worth the book\u00adclub read\u00ading. Which we did.<\/p>\n

The book works on a num\u00adber of levels, I find. It\u2019s writ\u00adten simply enough that it\u2019s a quick read, without los\u00ading depth of mean\u00ading. As an adult read\u00ading the book, you know what\u2019s going on long before the nar\u00adrat\u00ador Chris\u00adtoph\u00ader does, leav\u00ading you to observe his fig\u00adur\u00ading it out too, and to won\u00adder what he\u2019ll do when he knows. Chris\u00adtopher\u00ad\u2019s observ\u00adances of life and people, the seem\u00ading logic (although much of it isn\u2019t at all logic\u00adal) are remin\u00adis\u00adcent of vari\u00adous sci\u00adence fic\u00adtion char\u00adac\u00adters, such as Spock in Star Trek, or the wit\u00adness Ann in \u201cStranger in a Strange Land\u201d. The book lets you see the dicho\u00adtomy where sci\u00adent\u00adists are trained to not jump to con\u00adclu\u00adsions, and to be care\u00adful about assum\u00ading that A implies B, but in social inter\u00adac\u00adtions people are expec\u00adted to infer motives from beha\u00adviour, and to make assump\u00adtions about likely causes and mean\u00adings. Chris\u00adtoph\u00ader has prob\u00adlems in large part because he does\u00adn\u2019t make the con\u00adnec\u00adtions and infer\u00adences that most people would make. The big\u00adger part is that his reac\u00adtions to vari\u00adous stim\u00aduli are so over\u00adwhelm\u00ading that oth\u00ader people can\u00ad\u2019t under\u00adstand them.<\/p>\n

I like tak\u00ading books like this to book\u00adclub because we dis\u00adcov\u00ader dif\u00adfer\u00adent mean\u00adings in the dis\u00adcus\u00adsion; every\u00adone sees dif\u00adfer\u00adent points. One mem\u00adber, who works in the school sys\u00adtem here, poin\u00adted out how high-func\u00adtion\u00ading Chris\u00adtoph\u00ader was when he could make him\u00adself remem\u00adber the extra teach\u00ading he was giv\u00aden, that he could learn what the expec\u00adted reac\u00adtions were to every\u00adday social inter\u00adac\u00adtions even if he did\u00adn\u2019t under\u00adstand them. And that the care-givers also have to be taught how to react, how to sup\u00adport the learn\u00ading pro\u00adcess that takes so much longer and is so much harder than with chil\u00addren who don\u2019t have Asper\u00adger\u00ad\u2019s or autism.<\/p>\n

All in all, an excel\u00adlent book to read and think about, espe\u00adcially if you\u2019re a geek, sci\u00adent\u00adist, or have friends or fam\u00adily who are. There are cer\u00adtain traits that Chris\u00adtoph\u00ader has that geeks and sci\u00adent\u00adists share, though (of course) not usu\u00adally to the same degree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A review of Mark Had\u00addon\u2019s \u201cThe Curi\u00adous Incid\u00adent of the Dog in the Night-Time\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wp_typography_post_enhancements_disabled":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}