Temple Grandin

Temple Grandin: How the Girl Who Loved Cows Embraced Autism and Changed the World

by Sy Montgomery
148 pages
Houghton Mifflin

Publisher's description: 

When Temple Grandin was born, her parents knew that she was different. Years later she was diagnosed with autism. While Temple’s doctor recommended a hospital, her mother believed in her. Temple went to school instead. Today, Dr. Temple Grandin is a scientist and professor of animal science at Colorado State University. Her world-changing career revolutionized the livestock industry. As an advocate for autism, Temple uses her experience as an example of the unique contributions that autistic people can make. This compelling biography complete with Temple’s personal photos takes us inside her extraordinary mind and opens the door to a broader understanding of autism.

My comments:

I've enjoyed several of Montgomery's books about animals (especially Kakapo Rescue and The Good Good Pig) so I figured she would be a perfect fit to write about Temple Grandin's passion for animal welfare. I was not disappointed. Her writing is always engaging and warm, and I was immediately sucked in to her account of Grandin's life. I was especially struck with her description of how Grandin felt, as an autistic child, to be constantly overwhelmed by sensory data.

Montgomery makes clear to readers that people with austism make up a wide spectrum, from geeky but gifted kids to people who barely talk. The boarding school that Grandin attended in New Hampshire after being expelled from high school is compared to Hogwarts. Before Harry Potter went to Hogwarts, he was confused by his strange abilities and felt out of place. Once he went to a school where he could learn to harness his abilities, he was better able to cope in the larger world.

The book design is very eye-catching, and it's full of color photographs and Grandin's own diagrams. I found the section about the dip vat she designed to be very enlightening.  Montgomery tells the story of how Grandin was hired to design a new dip vat for delousing cows that wouldn't frighten them and result in deaths like the old vats did. Her keen eye for detail and ability to think in pictures, benefits of her autism, allowed her to see exactly what about the dip vat frightened the cows. The accompanying images were very helpful in explaining how the dip vat works

There are several cool extras included,as well,inclduing a page of facts about factory farming and a section of advice for kids with autism from Temple Grandin herself. Grandin also wrote the forward, and seems to have cooperated with Montgomery throughout the book's creation, posing for pictures and allowing photographs to be taken of her home.

A thorough bibliography and index are appended.

Under A Red Sky

Under a Red Sky: Memoir of a Childhood in Communist Romania
by Haya Leah Molnar
320 pages
Farrar Straus Giroux

Publisher's description:

Eva Zimmermann is eight years old, and she has just discovered she is Jewish. Such is the life of an only child living in postwar Bucharest, a city that is changing in ever more frightening ways. Eva’s family, full of eccentric and opinionated adults, will do absolutely anything to keep her safe—even if it means hiding her identity from her. With razor-sharp depictions of her animated relatives, Haya Leah Molnar’s memoir of her childhood captures with touching precocity the very adult realities of living behind the iron curtain.

My comments:

Aside from poetry, memoirs may be the most slippery of the nonfiction genres. James Frey's embellished truths and outright lies may have been relatively easy to sniff out in modern America, but who's to know how much of Eva Zimmerman/Haya Leah Molnar's childhood in 1950s Romania is true? She is upfront about the challenges in piecing a book together from her memories in her author's note at the beginning of the book. "The story is filtered through my memory," she writes, and also, "this is not a journalist's rendition of historical events but my personal story about growing up." Some names have been changed to protect people's privacy, and some conversations have been re-imagined, but the "essence" is true.

Her candor is evident throughout her story, which has no clear villains and few hugely dramatic events. Instead, she relies on the color provided by her family members (she grows up as the only child in a house filled with adults) and the quietly dramatic revelations that unfold over time. If there is a villain in the story, then it is the unseen, uncaring government bureaucracy which looms as a constant threat to her family's well-being.

The trials of Eva's childhoods include many that most anyone can identify with, like trying to fit in at school when you are different, getting along with family members who can be affectionate but rude, frustration at not understanding religion or your parents and worrying when your parents are unemployed. Others, like not being allowed to leave the country and not being allowed to take your possessions when you are allowed to leave, may tap in to the imaginations of those who read to experience circumstances far removed from their own.

Eva's father was a filmmaker and photographer, and several of his family photographs appear in a section towards the back of the book, strengthening her account. She doesn't just include them as window-dressing, but ingeniously incorporates them fully into her memories, telling the stories of how the photographs came to be so that when I saw the pictures, I said, for instance, "Aha! That is how she looked on her first day or school!"

I felt that the story ended a little too abruptly with the family's arrival in Israel. There are photographs of Eva's parents' vacation in their first car, and a self-portrait of her father as they immigrate to America. However, I was disappointed to find that the stories behind these photographs are not included in the book. Perhaps a second volume that covers her life in Israel and America is in the works? It's one that I would find worth reading.

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