Tito Mukhopadhyay reviews Strange Son

Tito Mukhopadhyay reviews the book, Strange Son, by Cure Autism Now's co-founder, Portia Iversen, on amazon.com.
His review is titled, "It was a slap on my face." It starts with this: "The book 'Strange Son' felt like a 'slap' on my face from someone who mother and I trusted the most." You can click on the above link to read the rest of it. In case you haven't heard who Mr. Mukhopadhyay is, he's a young man from India who is a brilliant poet and autistic. He is a main subject of Iversen's book.

Mr. Mukhopadhyay responded to other people's comments about the book on amazon.com, too. Portia Iversen complained there about one of the reviews saying that the reviewer must not have read the book, but the reviewer came back with page numbers showing that she had, in fact read the book. It's like a melodrama over there on amazon.com in the reviews of "Strange Mom." Autism Diva recommends that you don't read the book, not if you have to pay for it, anyway. Autism Diva listened to a borrowed audiobook CD. You might like, though, it if you are fond of "It was a dark and stormy night..." Bulwer-Lytton style purple prose. Iversen's prose tends toward the "mango colored."

Blogger, MOM-NOS, reviewed the book, too (here).

Autism Diva thinks that Portia Iversen exploited Mr. Mukhopadhyay, and his mother, both. The book is a record of the life Dov Shestack had growing up, assumed as it was by his parents that he was an empty shell. Forty hours a week of ABA didn't cure Dov for some reason, and yet in spite of all the therapy, without anyone noticing, he learned to read Hebrew (he attended a Jewish pre-school where it was taught, but no one thought Dov was learning anything, probably because they thought he was a "kidnapping" victim and an "empty shell").


More important reading about other autistic poets, Tito Mukhopadhyay, and Cure Autism Now.


Autism Diva
Go Tito!