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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Shallow and un-original, 18 May 2000
By A Customer
While there is a serious need for a book specifically on PDD-NOS (pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified), this isn't it; none of the information in it is specific to PDD-NOS and many of the parental accounts actually feature children diagnosed with Asperger's. The book is extremely brief, skimming over crucial issues and full of mis-spellings, mis-used words, and faulty grammar. Its coverage of treatment and educational issues doesn't go much beyond listing the names of common approaches and proving a few paragraphs on some of the best-known, featuring considerable misinformation (for example, claiming that requiring a child to make eye contact is a necessary preliminary to learning social skills). It even opens with a fundamental and misleading error, stating that PDD-NOS is more severe than Asperger's Syndrome and less severe than autism, while in fact PDD-NOS is technically used to diagnose children who do not meet either of the other sets of criteria, and so may in fact be used of children who are more mildly affected than children with Asperger's (as well as of children more severely affected). Despite the subtitle ("An Altered Perspective"), it presents no new information (in fact, no information beyond a sketchy account of the basics) and no different perspective; in fact, it doesn't present anything that couldn't be found in other, better books. The only thing that struck me as particularly novel was the extremely negative tone of several of the parental accounts (which I do not believe is representative of all parents of children with autistic spectrum conditions); one mother explained "I see my child as a sick child", while another describes with pride how she explained to her son that his PDD sister had a "awful monster in her head affecting her brain." It's not clear how this, presented in such an uncritical way by the book's authors, will help any parent come to terms with their child's disability.
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