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Lead book review

Did Hans Asperger save children from the Nazis — or sell them out?

Reviewing Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes, Simon Baron-Cohen, our leading authority on autism, wonders what really went on in Asperger’s children’s clinic in ‘Aryanised’ 1940s Vienna

12 September 2015

9:00 AM

12 September 2015

9:00 AM

Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter about People who Think Differently Steve Silberman

Allen & Unwin, pp.544, £16.99, ISBN: 9781760113636

Steve Silberman’s stunning new book looks across history, back to Henry Cavendish, the 18th-century natural scientist who discovered hydrogen, Hugo Gernsbach, the early-20th-century inventor and pioneer of amateur ‘wireless’ radio, and countless other technically brilliant but socially awkward, eccentric non-conformists, members of the ‘neurotribe’ we now call the autism spectrum.

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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £14.99 Tel: 08430 600033. Simon Baron-Cohen is Director of Cambridge University’s Autism Research Centre and author of Mindblindness and Zero Degrees of Empathy.

You might disagree with half of it, but you’ll enjoy reading all of it. Try your first month for free, then just $2 a week for the remainder of your first year.


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