Boy Alone

June 8, 2009
Noah Greenfeld, an autistic adult in his forties, has been the subject of four books by his parents Josh Greenfeld and Fumiko Kometani. Now his brother, journalist Karl Taro Greenfeld, provides his perspective on growing up with a severely autistic brother during an era when the condition was not very well understood. This well-crafted book illustrates Karl's years of confusion and embarrassment, changing from a childlike to an adult tone as the author grows up. The book is most powerful when Karl imagines what his life would have been like had his brother's treatment worked. Verdict While it is not the best story about autism and siblings (see Judy Karasik and Paul Karasik's The Ride Together), it still is a worthwhile addition to the literature.-Corey Seeman, Kresge Business Administration Lib., Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2009
A wrenching account of growing up with a profoundly autistic younger brother.

Journalist Greenfeld (China Syndrome: The True Story of the 21st-Century's First Great Epidemic, 2006, etc.) is the brother of Noah, for a time the best-known autistic child in the country. In a trilogy of books about Noah by their father Josh—beginning in 1972 with A Child Called Noah—the author is"a bit player who provides interesting contrast to his autistic brother but little more than that." Here, Greenfeld begins with his early memories as a toddler in the mid'60s. In 1971 the family moved from New York to California in a desperate search for help for Noah. The author then jumps ahead to his adolescent years in Pacific Palisades, where he, with his Japanese mother, Jewish father and a bizarrely behaving, disabled kid brother, was a social misfit. While the author got involved in petty crime, drugs and imaginary war games, family life revolved around Noah, whom he both resented and loved. Eventually Greenfeld and his parents moved to a new house, leaving Noah in their old one with a caretaker. With the new arrangement, Noah began to recede from his life, and Greenfeld began his own rocky climb to maturity. Memoir turns smoothly to fictional imagining in the later sections as the author thinks about Noah transforming into a brother who can talk to him and share experiences. But in the final pages he abruptly shifts back to harsh reality. Woven into this moving personal story is an account of the changing scientific approaches to autism, from Bruno Bettelheim's claim that cold mothers were the cause and the key to treatment, to the adherents of B.F. Skinner, who saw operant conditioning as the answer. With inadequate resources and conflicting research, parents of autistic children grasp at misleading claims. As Greenfeld makes clear, while early intervention may help the very young, for autistic adults, like his brother, the situation is exceedingly bleak.

Greenfeld spares neither himself nor his brother in this painfully honest, revealing memoir.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

March 2, 2009
These two memoirs explore life with an autistic family member.
Boy Alone: A Brother's Memoir
Karl Taro Greenfeld
. HarperCollins
, $25.99 (368p) ISBN 978-0-06-113666-5

Sibling rivalry—and love—of a ravaging kind is the subject of this unsparing memoir of the author's life with his severely autistic brother. Journalist Greenfeld (Standard Deviations
) describes his brother, Noah, as a “spitting, jibbering, finger-twiddling, head-bobbing idiot”; unable to speak or clean himself and given to violent tantrums, Noah and his utter indifference to others makes him permanently “alone.” But Karl feels almost as alienated; with his parents preoccupied with Noah's needs (and Noah's celebrity after his father, Joshua, wrote a bestselling account of his illness in A Child Called Noah
), he turns to drugs and petty crime in the teenage wasteland of suburban Los Angeles. Greenfeld doesn't flinch in his depiction of Noah's raging dysfunctions or his critique of a callous mental health-care system and arrogant autism-research establishment. (He's especially hard on the psychoanalytic theories of the “Viennese charlatan” Bruno Bettelheim.) But the author's self-portrait is equally lacerating; he often wallows in self-pity—“I return home stoned, drunk, puking on myself as I sit defecating into the toilet, crying to my parents... that I am a failure”—and owns up to the coldness that Noah's condition can provoke in him. The result is a bleak but affecting chronicle of a family simultaneously shattered and bound tight by autism.

Starred review from May 15, 2009
Josh Greenfelds A Boy Called Noah (1972) made parenting a severely autistic child a best-selling topic. Noahs brother Karl, older by two years, speaks out for the first time in this tour de force that summarizes 1960s and 1970s Freudian versus Skinnerian theories of autism and treatments and makes movingly candid observations about how autism can define a family. In his family, profiled in an October 1970 LIFE article that evoked the largest readers-letters response in the magazines history, Japanese mother Foumi desperately grasped at straws while Josh despondently recorded his sons failure to develop at a time, before the Internet, that is characterized as an era of despair. Eventually, the family left the growing autistic boy in the house with a caregiver and moved to a new house, away from memories that Karl says, in his family, were always of Noah. There, teenage Karl, though disappointing his parents with his poor grades and behavior, felt himself emerging from the entanglement of Noah, from the autism-centered morass that is my family. Eventually, with ASL signing and symbol use, Noah learned communication skills, speaking in somewhat limited terms and even, while maintained on Ativan and Haldol, flying to visit Karl in Asia. Now sad rather than resentful, Karl observes that Noah, though no longer destructive, will never fit in.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)