Autism Heroes by Barbara Firestone, PhD

This is a beautifully produced book with lovely black and white portraits which would look great on a coffee table or in a waiting room. That said, there's really nothing else that would lead me to recommend Autism Heroes. It's a compilation of short pieces that eulogize "ordinary" and celebrity parents of children with autism while also promoting the work of The Help Group, an autism support agency in California. The gist: parents are heroes if they do not reject their children with autism.

Barbara Firestone is the founder of The Help Group, an autism agency in southern California. The agency is very large and offers not only services, but also educational programs for people with autism. As a result, it serves a huge number of individual families, some of whom were selected to be profiled in this book.

As I read through the stories, I was reminded of a dreadful Disney TV cartoon called "Higglytown Heroes." In Higglytown, everyone is a hero simply by virtue of the fact that he does his job. The plumber is a hero for fixing the sink. The pizza guy is a hero for delivering the pizza. In Autism Heroes, parents are presented as heroes simply because they didn't walk away from their children with autism.

Throughout the book, parents are pictured as brave souls who rose to the challenge of finding appropriate treatment for their kids and continuing to love them "unconditionally" despite their scary diagnosis and differences. While there are plenty of parents who don't rise to the level of basic concern for their kids, it's hard for me to see those who do as heroic.

More annoying than the presentation of these "hero" parents is the fact that none of the children, even those who are very high functioning (and thus presumably more than capable of speaking for themselves), were interviewed for this book. They, apparently, are not heroes -- despite the obstacles they've overcome. In fact, they are presented entirely as passive recipients of "love and acceptance."

There will certainly be parents who find themselves in this book, since it does include families from many walks of life and ethnic backgrounds. And perhaps it would be worth a parent's time to pull the book off the shelf at the store to flip through. But I can't imagine too many people will feel the need to actually make a purchase.