I am reading “A child called Noah” by Josh Greenfeld.   It has been an interesting experience.   The book is basically pulled from Mr Greendfeld’s journal describing his autistic son and how the family’s life is affected by Noah’s autism.  Some parts of it are personally hard.  They are almost perfect reflections of  my own experience; in fact some of the passages might have been ripped right out of my own essays about life with Rachel.

The book has been borrowed from the Multnomah County Library and I am sure it has been read many times but interestingly someone before me decided that all other readers could benefit by their personal additions.  Yes some yahoo went through the book and underlined various “important” passages.   Unfortunately the defacing former reader obviously has an axe to grind (or maybe more).  In the first chapter they wrote “God d*** them” next to an underlined passage about how little help the medical profession had to offer.  Now why in 1969, when doctors knew even less than they do now about learning disabilities in general and autism in particular, the medical profession as a whole was worthy of damnation for not being able to tell the parents of an autistic child how to “fix” their child is beyond me, but there it is.  Well, actually it isn’t anymore.  I have an eraser and have been contentedly removing the underlining and “comments” that bother me as I come across them.