Cool Books (and a small rant)

The Arrival
By some guy named Tan (who's fucking brilliant).
Arthur R. Levine, November

A graphic novel without words, and the most sophisticated I've seen. A refugee flees to a New York-like city. Only it's a city with strange servant-creatures and transportation systems resembling late-19th c. fantasy. He meets other immigrants, many who've fled ridiculous ideological wars.

The most pro-immigration book of the season has no words at all.


The Squandering of America
Robert Kuttner
Knopf, October

The Editor-in-Chief of American Prospect has another diatribe. He talks about how hedge funds and derivatives are probably ruining the American economy, perhaps irrevocably. Makes a good case, and unlike a lot of people who discuss free-markets, his words make sense.

Look Me In The Eye: My Life with Asperger's
John Elder Robison
Crown, September

Memoir - rather eloquent - of living with Asperger's Syndrome. Reading it, it came to me that Aspies, like ADDers, don't need manuals to understand how we work. We know how our insides work. We have to, because it's so damn hard for us to get what we need from a world not set up for our minds.

What's needed, actually, is a handbook for how normal people's minds work. Perhaps it needs to be different for each culture, who knows. Here's why:

A) Most normal people don't know how they work.

B) Because of this, normal people tend not to realize when their unconscious actions are cruel (not just to Aspies, ADDers, and other people with disabilities, but to people of other races and shapes).

C) Because most cruel actions are unconscious, confronting someone about their unconscious action either boggles their mind (it's like talking about the purple Snufalufagus, because they didn't see that, either) Orit angers them, because you've suddenly pulled them out of the flow of their life. And pulling a person out of the flow of his life to force introspection - that will make most people really mad.

Books by ADDers, Aspies, and high-functioning Autistics often touch on how normal people work - usually with a mind-boggling jolt at the illogic of NTs (neurological typicals) - and therefore are the best thing we've got to manuals for the normal mind.

You see, we're on the outside (I'm an ADDer), so we know how screwy you all are.

Love and the Americans with Disabilities Act,
The Red Pooka!