Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism by Ron Suskind
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
At first I was a little dubious about the topic. The book starts off slowly but with the sure guidance of Ron Suskind’s writing. The story is positive, triumphant. It doesn’t necessarily highlight how great Disney is, but it does give us an interesting peak as to what family is about; and how good family supports itself and is able raising children in an environment that fosters their growth. What is of interest is how the public’s perception of autism has changed to better facilitate autistic inclusion, and yet still has room for improvement.
What’s of interest here isn’t the neurotypical/autistic as a real tragedy, but more about how that divide ignores the fact that all of us function differently. Normalcy is the expectation that all of us are able to function adequately to each other. And we are; but with exceptions. What is of great profound interest is that an autistic boy is able to use Disney as a social lattice to map his interaction with his family and then with the outside world. All of us use stories and cliches to guide our interaction/expectation with the outside world. Some of us just are more able to ground our behavior on a moment to moment guide. We need less structure to foster growth, but we all still need structure. I think the conception of normalcy in some way hides this structure because this structure is expected. With autism that structure is inadequate. We need some other way of allowing for growth.
Part of growth today requires that we are able to create a smooth rationality to realize things forwards and backwards. Not all people can do this to the same degree, of course. With autism, reasoning works only within a certain configuration. This story is about a family that was able reach their son by allowing that configuration to map outwards and envelope them all.
I used to dislike Disney to a great degree. I found the narrow confides of their socialization to be unacceptable. Restraining. To a great degree I still do. I’m not saying this book has helped change my mind about what (sub)cultures and social rigidity can do/impose on people, but I think we can see that there are many modes of reasoning and none of them are invalid although not all of them are socially acceptable.
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