Different Like Me
Different Like Me
My Book of Autism Heroes
Jennifer Elder
Illustrated by Marc Thomas and Jennifer Elder
Jessica Kingsley Publishers
London and Philadelphia
First published in 2006
by Jessica Kingsley Publishers
116 Pentonville Road
London N1 9JB, UK
and
400 Market Street, Suite 400
Philadelphia, PA 19106, USA
Copyright © Jennifer Elder 2006
Illustrations copyright © Marc Thomas and Jennifer Elder 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the publisher.
Warning: The doing of an unauthorised act in relation to a copyright work may result in both a civil claim for damages and criminal prosecution.
The right of Jennifer Elder to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Elder, Jennifer, 1968-
Different like me : my book of autism heroes / Jennifer Elder ; illustrations by Marc Thomas and Jennifer Elder.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-84310-815-3 (hardback : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-84310-815-1 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Autism—Juvenile literature. 2. Celebrities—Juvenile literature. I. Thomas, Marc. II. Title.
RC553.A88E43 2005
618.92’85882—dc22
2005014169
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84310 815 3
eISBN 978 1 84642 466 3
For Morgan and Bramwell
Hello! My name is Quinn. I’m eight and three-quarters years old. My favorite things are baseball, dolphins, and ancient Egypt. Oh yeah, and I’m autistic. Sometimes I don’t understand people, and sometimes they don’t understand me. Little things get on my nerves, like too many people talking at once. It can be hard to fit in. But when the other kids see how good I am at drawing, they are interested. This is how I make my place in the world. I just concentrate on what I do best.
Did you know that nobody had ever even heard of autism until the 1940s? It was around before then, but there just wasn’t a name for it yet. Then two different doctors, Dr. Kanner and Dr. Asperger, each started thinking about what some of their patients had in common. Some didn’t speak. Some were very good with numbers and patterns. Some were bothered by loud noises. But they all seemed to live in a world of their own, hardly noticing people around them. Both of these doctors, thousands of miles apart, looked at their patients and came up with the same word:Autism (from the Greek word for “self”).
Still, it took a long time for us to begin to understand autism. It wasn’t until forty years later that Dr. Asperger’s work became widely known. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, we have learned much more about autism and Asperger’s Syndrome in the Arts and Sciences—some who blend in with the crowd, and some who proudly let it show.
Sometimes I wonder about all the autistic people who lived before, though. Most probably never met anyone else like them. They must have thought that they were the only ones who ever cared more about trains, or music, or the planets, than about making friends. They probably assumed that every person on earth but them knew the secret to fitting in. Did they wonder why they weren’t like everybody else? And how did they turn their unique abilities into something great? It’s hard to say for sure, but there are even some famous people who I think may have been different like me...
Albert Einstein was not a boy genius—at least, not as far as anyone knew. Most people thought that he wasn’t very smart. He didn’t talk at all until the age of three, and still didn’t speak well when he reached the age of nine. About the only thing he was good at was playing the violin. Albert didn’t do well in school, and his teachers were often irritated with him. One school even threw him out. They thought he was hopeless.
They were wrong.
There was something going on inside Albert’s head, something wonderful. The first time Albert saw a compass, when he was around age five, he was fascinated. What made the needle move? How did it know which way to point? These questions, along with his love of math, would eventually lead young Albert to the science of physics.
After college, Albert took a job in a patent office. He never stopped thinking about physics, though, and began to write his ideas about time and space. Then, in 1905, he published a paper that shook the world. When people read what he wrote, they were amazed. Some of it was hard to understand; he predicted that time could slow as you approached the speed of light and that space itself could be pulled out of shape. He even showed that anything—a jellybean, a lump of metal, a drop of water—held immense energy inside of it. His ideas took years for other scientists to prove, but one thing was always certain:Einstein’s work would change everything. Albert became very famous. He traveled all over, lecturing and teaching—even at the college where he had been a poor student.
Some of Albert’s ideas were used to build the atomic bomb, the biggest weapon ever made. This made Albert sad, because he was a pacifist—someone
