Hanne's blog

I once read Oliver Sacks' "The Man Who Mistook Hiss Wife for a Hat". I was fascinated and a bit frightened by all the weird neurological diseases one can have that I'd never heard of before.

This book is not so frightening, the cases are more "normal" I think. It was harder to get through than the "hat". He describes some interesting fates, but either he gets more technical, or the cases are just less extraordinary. He lets himself get quite far away from the stories sometimes, I think (perhaps I shouldn't read the foot notes).

The one about Tourette's Syndrome was interesting. But perhaps I was just impatient to get to what I really bought the book for: The last story, the story the book is named after, "An Anthropologist on Mars".

It is about Temple Grandin who we can put into the box labeled "high functioning autist".

The author describes spending a few days with her, interviewing her and going places with her, seeing livestock handling systems she has designed etc.

She has been highly autistic in her childhood. She still shows autistic traits - walks a bit oddly, she talks for a long time - on topic - and it doesn't occur to her to offer him coffee until he asks. She lives alone. She has a squeeze machine in her bedroom to fulfill a need for physical pressure that she cannot get through hugging people. The title stems from how she feels when she observes other people's complex emotions and interactions, trying to interpret it without the intuitive understanding "normal" people supposedly have. Her life mostly consists of her work.

She has a PhD and a very successful career in designing animal handling facilities for farms, slaughterhouses etc. She is good with cows. She understands them, she cares for them. Much easier than with people, and she is doing a lot for them through her work. "With farm animals, I feel their behaviour. With primates I intellectually understand their interactions.", she says.

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