The BBC has reported that author Steve Silberman has won the £20,000 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction for his book about autism.
The judges said Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently was a “tour de force” of journalistic and scientific research.
It is the first popular science book to win the prize in its 17-year history.
Historian Anne Applebaum, chair of the judges, praised Silberman’s “compassionate journalism” and said he excelled at using stories and anecdotes to explain complex medical issues to a wide audience.
The American author, who is based in San Francisco, has been a science writer for Wired and other magazines such as the New Yorker, the MIT Technology Review, Nature and Salon for more than 20 years.
“We admired Silberman’s work because it is powered by a strongly argued set of beliefs: that we should stop drawing sharp lines between what we assume to be ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, and that we should remember how much the differently-wired human brain has, can and will contribute to our world,” Applebaum said.
“He has injected a hopeful note into a conversation that’s normally dominated by despair.”
Neurotribes, she added, was “a tour de force of archival, journalistic and scientific research, both deeply researched and widely accessible”. In its review of Silberman’s book, The Guardian described Neurotribes as “a gripping narrative written with journalistic verve”.
The £20,000 Samuel Johnson Prize was won last year by Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk.
The National Autistic Society describes autism as a lifelong developmental disability that affects how a person communicates with, and relates to, other people. It also affects how they make sense of the world around them.
It is a spectrum condition, which means that, while all people with autism share certain difficulties, their condition will affect them in different ways. Some people with autism are able to live relatively independent lives but others may have accompanying learning disabilitie and need a lifetime of specialist support. People with autism may also experience over – or under sensitivity to sounds, touch, tastes, smells, light or colours.
Asperger Syndrome is a form of autism. People with Asperger syndrome are often of average or above average intelligence. They have fewer problems with speech but may still have difficulties with understanding and processing language.
How do people with autism see the world?
People with autism have said that the world, to them, is a mass of people, places and events which they struggle to make sense of, and which can cause them considerable anxiety.
In particular, understanding and relating to other people, and taking part in everyday family and social life may be harder for them. Other people appear to know, intuitively, how to communicate and interact with each other, and some people with autism may wonder why they are ‘different’.
Speech and language therapy can help people with autism, for example in developing their social communication skills.
The Guardian reported that working for Wired magazine, Silberman first began to look into the topic when he discovered that two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs he had interviewed had autistic children. Telling a friend about “this curious synchronicity” in a cafe, a special-education teacher at the next table overheard, and informed him: “There is an epidemic of autism in Silicon Valley. Something terrible is happening to our children.”
Neurotribes is his exploration of the rise in diagnoses, tracing the history of the disorder, from the clinicians who discovered it in 1943 to the controversy around the MMR vaccine, as well as exploring its impact on families, and the growing “neurodiversity” movement.
Neurotribes beat shortlisted titles including Jonathan Bate’s biography of Ted Hughes, which has proved controversial following complaines from the poet’s widow Carol Hughes, Robert Macfarlane’s look at language and landscapes, Landmarks, and Emma Sky’s The Unravelling, about her time in Iraq as a civilian volunteer and, later, a political adviser.
“Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes is the book ‘families affected by autism have long deserved’”
The Guardian goes on to say how the winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction is optimistic about how the world can become a better place for autism
“Silberman’s compassionate journalism explores the impact of popular culture on perceptions of autism, and the impact of autism on the families of those who live with it,” said Applebaum.
Applebaum was joined on the judging panel by the editor of Intelligent Life Emma Duncan; the editor of New Scientist Sumit Paul-Choudhury; the director of the China Centre at Oxford University, Professor Rana Mitter; and film executive Tessa Ross. While Applebaum has said that the meeting to pick the shortlist was “truly contentious; it’s hard to imagine how five people sitting in a room on a weekday morning could have disagreed more strongly”, picking their overall winner was “not a bitter debate”.
“We had a very diverse shortlist,” she said. “Each in its own category is superior – the Jonathan Bate is clearly a brilliant biography; Samanth Subramanian’s This Divided Island is a brilliant piece of journalism. But in the end we went with the book we felt would have the widest impact, and which represented in my view a transcendence of genre.
Neurotribes, she said, “is a combination of different kinds of non-fiction techniques. He takes a problem and looks at it from different angles. So this is a book about autism, but it is also about the human brain … about how we look at people who are different.”
And it is, she said, “deeply original – a wonderful piece of storytelling which is deeply researched and powerful in its message.”
“The conversation about autism is often very depressing, but Neurotribes ends on a very hopeful note about how to think differently about this condition. It is a very moving book,” she said.
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Written by Rachel Harrison, speech and language therapist, on behalf of Integrated Treatment Services
