Volume 48, Number 5 · March 29, 2001
Leaving Nirvana
By Oliver Sacks
In 1967, a remarkable book was published, The Siege, by Clara Claiborne Park, an account of her daughter's first eight years. It was remarkable on several counts. It was the first 'inside' (as opposed to clinical) account of an autistic child's development and life; and it was written with an intelligence, a clearsightedness, an insight, and a love that brought out to the full the absolute strangeness, the 'otherness,' of the autistic mind. It also brought out how much an empathetic understanding could help to lay 'siege' to autism's seemingly impregnable isolation.
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