Have a nice trip through our world ("The Reason I Jump" by Naoki Higashida)

Our view of autism is a limited one. We do know that there is a spectrum of autisms, we do know that each case is different in it's particulars, and we do know that there are some common characteristics. But, really, the formal knowledge is very sparse, and the carers of people with autism don't have much to go on.

If you haven't had personal experience with autism, you might be thinking of Dustin Hoffman in "Rain man" right now, or a similar popular depiction. You would be wrong. I know that my understanding of even a "well-adapted" autistic person was way off the mark. Autism is, in fact, a world completely different from our own, and our attempts at grasping it fully are doomed to fail. Naoki wrote "The Reason I Jump" when he was thirteen, and his depiction of the world of autism shatters into pieces a multitude of our common sense misconceptions. So many things we would take for granted seem to be the polar opposite of reality. This is so much the case that it is difficult to classify the book as "non-fiction". Either the book was made up by someone who is non-autistic, and is complete fiction, or we have up till now grossly underestimated and unappreciated the potential and complexity of autistic personalities.

This word, "corruption"... (Behind The Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo)

I honestly don't know where to begin. It is such a thought-provoking work!

Spoiler alert - I will be talking directly about what the book made me think about. However, in this case, I feel that it might be overlooked, even if you haven't read it yet, since we are actually talking about a news report!

At first glance, "Behind the beautiful forevers" seems to be a fictional narrative about a slum, called Annawadi, that is situated very near a Mumbai airport. The story revolves around several families in Annawadi, and how they get by. The characters and events seem to be constructed to tell a particular story, however, it turns out that the whole work is an extended report by a journalist. Katherine is a journalist for "The New Yorker", and has spent her professional career by reporting from areas of extreme poverty. After she got married in India roughly some ten years ago, she took on herself the project of telling the story of an average Mumbai undercity. She spent three years in Annawadi (2008-2011), and all the names, events, motivations, psychology etc. are factual (to the extent the truth can even be ascertained in such a context - the author's note at the end of the book sheds some light on the subject).