Tag: nonfiction

Educated by Tara Westover

~ Linda ~ Leave a comment

Educated is Tara Westover`s memoir of family control and ignorance and an awakening as she seeks answers and knowledge. This was a book recommended to me by a friend and neither the title or the recommendation suggested the kind of horror and abuse that Tara Westover and her family suffered.

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The Westovers are a Mormon family whose fanatic father has re-tooled the religion into his private cult. He selects snippets from the Bible or the Book of Mormon and dictates to his family how they will act and what contact with the outside world they can make. His twisted beliefs come from feelings of deep paranoia. He is sure that the government, educational institutions, and health care are in a conspiracy to harm him and his family.

In her memoir, Tara Westover, tries to patch together a childhood of fear and abuse and fierce love. Her memories are confused and like all of us, some recollections might have planted themselves as memories because other family members have recounted them so often. Nonetheless, her life story is compelling and appalling.

The rules her father makes have no logic. Dairy products are taboo, a year`s supply of food they preserve themselves, must be stockpiled so when some government Armageddon descends, they can hide in the Idaho hills and survive until the crisis passes. To this end, Tara`s father insists his wife become a midwife and healer. It makes them more self-reliant. Tara is her mother`s assistant when she isn`t helping with the family scrap business. Her father and brothers work at this except when they are trucking. The work is dangerous, hard, and performed without concern for even minimal safety standards.

Horrific injuries have to be endured and her mother struggles to provide healing. Burns, brain injuries, deep wounds seldom receive medical attention and if they do, the patient is taken home long before a proper recovery is realized.

From this chaotic, illogical environment, Tara Westover, a young woman with no formal schooling, no birth certificate, and a strange mixture of fears and beliefs, studies for and gets the marks on the ACT exam which assesses students on high school curriculum and their readiness for college. Tara is admitted to Brigham Young University of the strength of her results; she has never heard of the Holocaust, of the American Civil Rights Movement, yet somehow her hard work and quick brain make up for these omissions. She is invited to Harvard and to Cambridge in England.

Tara Westover`s story makes compelling reading. You are drawn along with the kind of urgency that a thriller or horror novel might demand. The best part of this memoir, is that there is a resolution of sorts and that against all odds, Tara has prevailed.

Asperger’s Children by Edith Sheffer

~ Linda ~ 1 Comment

Asperger’s Children traces as the subtitle says, The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna.

Today one in sixty-eight children is diagnosed with autism. The term was introduced in 1911 by Eugene Bleuler, a Swiss psychiatrist but the “father” of autism was Hans Asperger, a Nazi psychiatrist from Vienna. Austria initially embraced the Third Reich and its goal of transforming human behaviour. Some people would be transformed and others eliminated.

The Final Solution and resulting Holocaust are well known. What isn’t nearly as well known is the program to euthanize children who wouldn’t be useful to the Nazi machine. The disabled, the paralyzed, the slow thinkers, the bed wetters, the harelips, the epileptics, the ineducable, the unable to work were all categories of children to get rid of. They had to connect to the “collective” of National Socialism. If they weren’t useful to the regime in some way, it was deemed best to remove their burden on society.

Aperger’s Children is Edith Sheffers’ history of autism and how it was a creation of Dr. Hans Asperger to describe children who had trouble making eye contact, making friends, and with social contact. Before the Nazis came to Vienna, he worked with children he called autistic pychopaths and tried to help them. As Austria was absorbed into the Nazi expansion, he was drawn in to the euthanasia for “useless” (my term) children. Reputable Jewish psychiatrists left Vienna, as did others who felt threatened. Asperger stayed and over the war years, he published and refined his defintion and diagnosis of autism. In the beginning, he seemed more humane and involved in trying to help children. Besides the obvious categories listed above, rebellious children, those who defied parents, or were viewed as an expense were referred to him and others like him. Arbitrarily. children as old as 16 were evaluated as salvageable or sent to Pavilion 17 in Spiegelgrund, a clinic for problem youth. Many children entered Pavilion 17 healthy and left in a death cart. Some were subjected to medical experiments; all were mistreated, even tortured.

Dr. Hans Asperger was a part of this killing program. He didn’t directly administer needles or perform experimental surgeries but he did diagnose and send children to Pavilion 17. He was well aware of their fate and as the war progressed, he tailored his papers and lectures to reflect Nazi policies more and more. One thing he never did was join the Nazi party although he did join several organizations affiliated with it. He was a Catholic and these two things saved him when the Allies arrived.

Only three of the doctors involved in the death program in Spiegelgrund were prosecuted for their part in euthanizing children. They received short sentences they didn’t fully serve. Other doctors, nurses and workers had a similar fate and after the war were back working in children’s clinics.

Dr. Hans Asperger continused as a psychiatrist and held several chairs and leading positions at universities. He didn’t pursue his autism work but went on to different interests. It was in 1981, that Lorna Wing, a leading British psychiatrist, discovered his 1944 thesis and from it came the description and designation of Asperger’s syndrome. She was fascinated by his patients’ symptoms and how they were related to Gemut (a German term referring to an individual’s connection to the collective, almost like a soul, and very much the social aspect of a person.)

In the 1990’s the autism idea took off. The diagnosis could be low-functioning, medium-functioning, or high functioning. The scary thing is that the diagnosis began with Asperger’s work in Nazi Vienna. It wasn’t well-documented, the number of patients he examined was low, and his research flimsy. Yet, today, children are treated using his ideas of what may be wrong with them.

This was a difficult post to write. The work at Spiegelgrund was so horrifying and Asperger ended up with his name attached to the condition he used to send children to their deaths. Asperger’s Children is a difficult book to read; I could only handle a chapter at a time. It is an important book, though, and one that is well worth biting your lip and getting through.

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