But for me the real draw is in the stories. The careful records kept and the nearly endless ways of analyzing the data remain interesting. We frequented ballparks, minor and major league, throughout the season.įor me, baseball is about two things that fascinate me, history and math. It was also the year when my son grew old enough to start appreciating baseball and I got to enjoy the sublime pleasure of taking him to his first game.
CODA 2 DISCOUNT 2015 SERIES
My beloved and beleaguered Mets surprised everyone by being a year or two ahead of expectations and making it all the way to the World Series before running into the Royals and their seeming ability to continually rise from the dead. It is Silberman’s genius to both trace a long and complicated medical history and yet to show so compellingly how that frontier is right here, right now.ĭavid Crotty: The summer of 2015 was, in my household, a summer of baseball.
It’s becoming (almost?) a commonplace that disability is the next civil rights frontier. This perspective does not discount the reality of disability, but it does change the focus from research into causes and cures to support for autistic children and adults and their families. Rather then pathologies to be cured, or prevented, brain differences should be understood as part of natural human differentiation. While Neurotribes is the work of many years of research and writing by one journalist, it is also the product of a movement of autistic activists who have been arguing for a new understanding of brain differences. That played an important part, as Silberman illustrates, in the hysteria over an “autism epidemic.” The best studies show clearly that autism is not on the rise, but that the use of newer and more sensitive diagnostic instruments account for increases in rates of autism. Infamously, a not only flawed but intentionally corrupt study linked autism with vaccines. Neurotribes also makes a critical comment on issues we care a lot about here at the Kitchen - failed peer review, bad science, and what happens when policy and money run with rather than against them. Silberman returns to the work of Hans Asperger, Leo Kahner and others to show how ideas about autism evolved, changed, and devolved over the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity is not a history of autism it is, rather, an account of how we came to diagnose particular qualities, characteristics and experiences as “autism,” and what that diagnosis then came to mean over time. It’s a book that has historicity - it is of a moment, but it also resurrects a forgotten, in fact trampled, historical past. My favorite read this year is in this last category. And then there are books that seem particularly urgent, that punctuate developments gaining currency and momentum. There are books that you’re glad to see published and then read because they articulate issues that you didn’t even know you were trying to think about. Karin Wulf: There are so many different kinds of “best books.” There are books that stick with you because the themes and the language are so evocative. Here’s Part 2 of our list, Part 1 can be found here. This is one of the great things about books in all forms - they endure, invite visitation and revisitation, and beckon with ideas. As always, this is not a “best books of 2015″ list, but a list of the best books the Chefs read during 2015 - the books might be classics, a few years old, or brand new. Continuing an annual tradition, we take a moment to pause at year’s end to look back on the best books we encountered.
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