Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant by Daniel Tammet
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Book Summary Author: Daniel Tammet Edition: Hardcover Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published) Published: 2007-01-09 ISBN: 1416535071 Number of pages: 240 Publisher: Free Press |
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Book Reviews of the Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant
Customer Review: Truly Unique Perspective on Autism from the Subject Himself
Summary: 5 Stars
If a picture is truly worth a thousand words, then the savant gifts of Daniel Tammet are all the more startling because he has an ability to meld his senses together seamlessly to see things nobody else can. It's an impressive, even daunting prowess that comes at a high price since he has Asperger's syndrome, a neurological disorder that causes him to be limited in his ability to fit in with the larger culture, as well as synaesthesia, a condition where sounds, words or numbers can translate into colors, shapes or textures. In fact, the latter condition is reflected in the book's title as he associates the color blue with Wednesdays. What makes this book so thoroughly unique is that the book is not a treatise of a subject by a medical professional but a memoir by the subject himself.
As such, there are no grand conclusions drawn about either medical condition, or scientific assumptions of how Tammet came to his gifts. What the author does quite plainly is share how he approaches such astonishing feats as reciting pi to over 22,000 decimal points over the course of five hours. We get a palpable sense of how he perceives theorems and automatically develops strategies based on his innate sense with numbers and images. But before you can say Rain Man, you also see a young man who is actually functioning in the world on his own, which illustrates perfectly the spectrum of severity with autism. Tammet's affliction has mild enough for him to be relatively self-sufficient, even though his struggles to gain societal acceptance have been a traumatizing road.
Raised by loving parents, he spent most of his childhood alone and could only relate to fellow outsiders like immigrants and exchange students, people who heightened his facility for foreign languages. There were signs - a hyper-sensitivity to noise; almost complete literal-mindedness; a narrow but intense interests in a few, eccentric subjects at the exclusion of others; displays of socially inappropriate behavior (which he has since been able to manage); and peculiarities in speech and thought patterns. It all comes together as a fascinating portrait with no pretense toward a false sense of triumph over extreme adversity. Such clichés are better left to Lifetime TV-movies since Tammet lives a good, simple life in London with his life partner Neil Mitchell and is busy creating a new language and conquering other mathematical frontiers. One cannot help but root for him thanks to his wonderfully personal, unaffected memoir.