When his mother picked him up to leave, “His disapproval would be registered with a tantrum of mammoth proportions,” she wrote. “I had to carry him while he screamed, punched, continually kicked my shins, scraped his fingernails down my face, or tried to bit me to demonstrate the full force of his rage. Exhausted, I finally got him to our tenement building, where I then had to negotiate six flights of stairs to our apartment.”

People were cruel when they saw his autistic behavior and said he was spoiled and suggested spanking him.

And yet, as the Reading Group Guide at the back of the book says, “... some researchers’ (believe) that many of humanity’s greatest thinkers were autistic, from Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein ...”