Those of us who are parents of children who have Asperger's Syndrome, a variant of autism, have lots of worries. We worry about their social life and fret about their friendships. We worry about their education (boy do worry about their education!) We worry about the various therapies that are available and whether we have made the right choices. Parents of children who have special needs of any type worry a lot. And that's on top of all the normal worries that any parent has about their children.

Most of all we worry about how they are going to make their way in the world once we are gone. We want them to be financially secure, fulfilled in their work, and happy. We worry about what they are going to do.

We hear that various historical figures may have had Asperger's Syndrome like Ludwig van Beethoven, Albert Einstein, Thomas Jefferson, and Jonathan Swift. That lifts us up but how does fascination with Bakugan and Sponge Bob Square Pants translate into being the next Albert Einstein? Most of us don't expect Einstein we just want them to have a job and be self supporting. A spouse would be great, kids would be wonderful.

Some of us parents hunger for stories of those that have made their way. Tim Page is one of those guys. He is in his mid 50's and he didn't get diagnosed until a few years ago. Tim is a Pulitzer Prize winning music critic. He has written a book that talks about his life from early childhood until he got out of college.

He had it kind of rough. He had no social skills or instincts at all. He never felt connected to his peers or his family. He didn't do that well in school in fact he got thrown out of one. He made it though. It wasn't pretty. He consumed lots of acohol, smoked dope, dropped acid but he still made it. He had an intense interest in music.

He started by playing his parents records over and over and learning all about them. And it went from there. He also made home made films as a child. He had a creative spark and drive and he never gave up.

This book is great. It is not a "pretty" story about how overcame his disability by hard work and help from teachers, pastors, sunday school classes, the Bible, boy scouts, sports, and a paper route. It is about a bewildered kid trying to figure out why he didn't fit in and who had a passion for music and pursued it. He had loving but also bewildered parents. He had various adults take an interest in him but Tim Page made it on his own.

How much better can we do now that we know how to diagnose and treat youngsgters with Asperger's Syndrome? A bunch I hope.

This is a great book. If you want to read the story of somebody who has Asperger's Syndrome this is good. He doesn't provide any great insights into therapies or advance any theories he just tells his story. The book is well written and compelling. It is short. I read it in two days. Sweetie is reading it now. ( )

If Asperger's wasn't mentioned in the title, I wouldn't be sure that it was relevant to the rest of the story. Well written first half, slacks off a bit after that. Felt kinda pointless. ( )

The bare facts of Tim Page’s professional life show that not only has he been tremendously successful, he’s very decidedly followed his own path. His lifelong love of music led to employment as a radio show host, a platform that allowed him to interview many of his living heroes in the arts world. He won a Pulitzer Prize writing as the Washington Post’s classical music critic, a job title he’d coveted since the age of three or four. When he discovered Dawn Powell, then a mainly forgotten author he found he loved, Page got most of her works back in print, edited books of her diaries and letters, and wrote a critically acclaimed biography. Page is now is a music and arts journalism professor at the University of Southern California, an especially impressive accomplishment since he dropped out of high school because it bored him so much he could not force himself pay attention, even when he stuck himself with pins in a futile effort to stay alert.

While high school couldn’t hold his interest, Page has had passions that have brought him attention since he was very young. His fascination with silent movies kept him busy writing, producing and filming his own shaky, black and white versions, using the neighborhood kids as his cast. “A Day with Timmy Page”, a documentary about Page’s movie making, shows Page as a talented, somewhat tyrannical, very young looking 13-year-old charging around shouting stage directions to his friends and yelling “Lights, action, camera!”

While turning the neighborhood kids into movie stars and chasing his passions into adulthood have caused people to admire Page for “thinking outside the box.”, Page confesses early in his newly released memoir Parallel Play that he has never had more than a shadowy, uneasy sense of what those “boxes” are. The boundaries of the boxes are invisible to him, he can’t make out why other people think they are significant, and he’s uncertain how to steer his life around or through them—leaving him with what he describes as an anxious, melancholy feeling that his entire life has been spent in “parallel play”, next to but irrevocably separate from everyone else. At the age of 45 he was finally given a name for his condition—Asperger’s syndrome.

Aspperger’s syndrome is an autism spectrum disorder, though Asperger’s differs from conventional autism in that language and cognitive skills are not much compromised. People with Asperger’s can be brilliant in their chosen fields, and if they are lucky their talents line up with skills that are considered valuable. Some of the traits “Aspies” can have include an abhorrence of changes in routine, the tendency to be easily over stimulated, a knack for being uncoordinated, the inability to effortlessly understand social cues like body language and tone of voice, and an inclination to develop obsessions they become extremely knowledgeable about that are often shared in long winded, one-sided conversations.

Neurodiversity is a relatively new word for the idea that atypical neurological development is a normal human variation. Advocates make the case that neurodiversity is as important for the vitality of human society as biodiversity is for the health of the planet. Neurodiverse Aspies enrich our lives with singular creations and penetrating insights into their fascinations of choice. A Googled list of famous people who may have been Aspies includes Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, and Ludwig van Beethoven.

But while many Aspies have made wonderful contributions to the world, it is not always a lot of fun to be one or live with one. Page says that as a child his “memory was so acute and his outlook so bleak” that he was sometimes described as a genius, even though he had difficulty telling left from right, and he continued to absentmindedly wet his pants into adolescence. His peculiar understandings and creative abilities may have been celebrated by the adults in his life, but he was also given any number of medical tests, psychiatric screenings, exercise regimes and medications, all with the goal of curing him.

Reading Parallel Play is eye-opening, and learning what life with Asperger’s is like is really only a small part of it. Page vividly remembers things people with more ordinary brains have long forgotten, and his descriptions of what it feels like to be a child are so fully realized they can reawaken that sense in the reader, even bringing back to life personal memories long hidden in some dusty neural crevice. Parallel Play is also packed with entertaining details of the sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll mentality rampant in the 60s and 70s, the era when an idealistic girl Page knew was determined to turn her naturally carnivorous dog into a vegetarian, and when hippies could be pro “free love”, but clueless about or even hostile towards gay rights. Page relates the history of the time and his own stumblings toward adulthood with compassion and humor.

Parallel Play began as an August 2007 New Yorker article, and though it has been greatly expanded it still maintains the deeply moving quality of the original. Asperger’s and Autism memoirs are fascinating reads and are almost numerous enough now to have their own genre, but this one has the advantage of being written by someone who is a close observer of culture and a professional writer, so it’s beautifully composed. Page is both insightful and unwaveringly honest, and while the book can be painfully sad it is more often hilariously funny. ( )