Authors to discuss new book at Illinois State Library
In a Different Key: The Story of Autism, by John Donvan and Caren Zucker. Crown Publishers, $30.
The lives of John Donvan and Caren Zucker have both been touched by autism and their passion for the subject shines through in their new book, In a Different Key: The Story of Autism. The tome (552 pages not counting endnotes) is equal parts exhaustive and engaging.
“The book is a look back at how autism – the term, the concept and the people who have the diagnosis – have interacted with society and how that interaction has turned out to be an amazing story and lens on American life itself,” explains Donvan. The story takes the form of a series of civil rights battles fought over five decades, primarily by parents of children with autism to give their kids a place in the world. “We really have come a long way in making room in the world for children with autism,” he says, “but we haven’t done the same, yet, for adults with autism.”
“It’s not just a history in the chronological sense,” says Zucker of the book. “It contains the stories of these people and the passion and the activism that helped change the world. It’s written to try to captivate people outside of the autism community, to engage them in understanding and being inspired by what can be done to change things.”
Donvan agrees. “It’s written to be accessible, almost like watching a movie. That way people who don’t know about autism have a reason to keep turning the pages.”
The diagnosis known as autism continues to change, according to Donvan. While right now the medical community sees autism as happening along a spectrum, there were times when it was seen as encompassing several discrete syndromes such as Asperger syndrome – a term which is not used medically anymore.
The story of Donald Triplett, the first person diagnosed with autism, makes up a large portion of the book. Triplett was born in 1933, was seen at Johns Hopkins in 1938 and was named in the first case that laid out the diagnosis of autism in 1943.
“The thing about Donald is we were fortunate to meet him,” says Zucker. Armed only with his first name and last initial, as he was listed in the medical literature, along with his reported hometown of Forest, Mississippi, Zucker set out to locate him. In 2007 she methodically went through the Forest telephone directory to try to track him down. After about a dozen phone calls to people with last names starting with T, she happened upon an answering machine message that caught her ear. “I heard this voice that said ‘Hey! Happy spring and have a wonderful fall and a terrific Christmas! And happy 2007!’” Zucker had no doubt that she had hit pay dirt. “I have a child with autism, so the second I heard the message I knew this was Donald.”
The city of Forest, it turned out, was fiercely protective of Donald. “We were told, ‘We’ll introduce you to Donald but if you mess with him in any way we will track you down and get you,’” says Zucker. “It wasn’t like anything we had ever seen before, this community that had embraced this now-82-year-old man over the course of his lifetime.” As they learned more about Donald it all made more sense. Along with his warm and winning personality, displaying the guilelessness and innocence often associated with autism, it turned out he was from a well-established family of bankers. In his 20s, Donald became the first autistic person to learn to drive a car. He is an avid golfer and to this day, at age 82, travels all over the world on his own. “He’s got a great life,” says Zucker. “Don and I like to say, if we could bottle whatever it was they had in Forest, Mississippi, the world would be a much better place for people who are different.”
Zucker and Donvan were working at ABC News as a producer-correspondent team when Zucker’s son was diagnosed with autism in 1996. Donvan’s wife was raised in Israel with a brother who was severely autistic. It was at that point that they began a series of stories on autism. They did the series “Echoes of Autism” for ABC with segments on subjects ranging from sibling relationships to falling in love. “Somewhere in the middle of all that reporting we decided to do something that would endure past a TV news piece.”
The result was In a Different Key, published by Crown earlier this year. Both authors will be giving the keynote presentation on the book as part of “Targeting Autism: A National Forum on Serving Library Patrons on the Spectrum” at the Illinois State Library’s Gwendolyn Brooks Building, 300 S. Second St., on Friday, March 11, at 10 a.m. The event is free and open to the public.
Contact Scott Faingold at [email protected].
