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Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism-A Father, a Daughter, and a Search for New Answers. Roy Richard Grinker. New York: Basic Books, 2007. 340 pp.
A fundamental concern of medical anthropology is how sociocultural processes influence the ways in which populations define, conceptualize, and manage disease. In Unstrange Minds, Roy Richard Grinker examines this classic issue with regard to autism in a well-written and interesting book. Psychiatry remains particularly rich terrain for such an investigation because psychiatric diagnoses remain subjective, intensely debated, and markedly variable across cultures and over time. A key framing issue for the work is the debate that has emerged over the last decade in popular discourse in the United States and Europe regarding the possibility of an autism "epidemic." Grinker addresses these issues from a number of angles, including rich narrative accounts of families' experiences with autism in a variety of societies, historical debates over the nature of autism as a diagnostic category, and discussion of the sociocultural forces implicated in bringing the idea of a possible "epidemic" into public consciousness.
A key element of the work is Grinker's detailed description of his family's own encounter with autism. His...