Send in the Idiots

A remarkable, elegantly written portrait of five autistic men and women, and what their struggles and triumphs reveal about this baffling condition and about us all When he was four years old Kamran Nazeer was enrolled in a small school in New York alongside other children diagnosed with autism. Here they received care that was at the cutting edge of developmental psychology. Kamran is now a policy adviser in Whitehall – but what of the others? With rare perception, he tells of their lives: the speechwriter unable to make eye contact, the courier who gets upset if anyone touches his bicycle, the suicidal depressive, and the computer engineer who communicates difficult emotions through the use of hand puppets.