The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius

The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius by Kristine Barnett. Random House 2013 ISBN 9780812993370, ebook 9780679645245

It was a total pleasure to read this book. While my son isn't the genius that Jacob in the book is, it was interesting to read about a woman and her autistic son, Jacob, that in many ways traveled some of the same paths that I have been traveling for year. This is a very special book which showed not only the help she gave her son, but also other autistic children. The author, Kristine Barnett, is a very giving woman even though dealing with chronic physical problems and another child in the family that also had special needs.
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Here is the review that I wrote for Amazon.

I could so much relate to this woman's story and how she is raising her autistic/genius son. No, I don't have a genius son, but I do have an autistic son who is rather bright and in many ways their stories are roughly parallel. The author tells the story of how her son who seemed normal at birth became more and more distant and different as he got older till at around age 2 he became non-verbal. Then she hunted down the doctors, therapists, and treatment ideas that would hopefully be able to help her son. She found though, that their ideas didn't seem to be doing much for her son and at times seemed almost detrimental. Please note that she is not knocking these people trained in dealing with autistic people, only that what they were doing didn't work for her and her son Jacob. I ran into the same thing when I was having trouble getting my son to eat. The recommendation: if he doesn't eat dinner, send him to bed hungry and he will soon learn to eat his dinner. Well, two mornings with my son throwing up on the kitchen floor due to being too hungry was enough for me. That didn't work and I wasn't about to see just how many mornings my son would be sick until he decided to eat supper because some childless therapist thought it was a great idea. I doubt that any therapist would give that sort of advice now, but that was close to 30 years ago when as much wasn't known about treating autistic children.

The author learned to combine her talents as a mother and a daycare provider with how she helped her son. As she started to notice and encourage his unique talents to get him to react to everyday situations and to talk, he started to respond. I called this going through the backdoor with my son. Instead of the normal frontal approach, you have to go out back and find a different way, or many different ways of reaching these children. Happily Jacob responded and then was able to pour his intellect into math, physics, and astronomy.

This book is one about hope and finding each child's unique talent or interest to help them come into normal relationships. Well written by one very busy mother whose family spent everything they had to not only help Jacob but also to open a center for other autistic children where they can participate in activities that usually they are kept out of such as sports of all kinds (many autistic children have coordination problems). If you have an autistic child and are looking for new ideas to help them, this book just might give you some answers and food for thought, although I'm sure that it will upset some mainstream providers of care.

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I hope many of you will read this book or pass it on to families that are coping with autism in any of its shapes and forms.



  

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

As a seamstress and a reader, I was impressed by this book. Even though there might have been technical flaws with the timeline of the book, the story itself was astonishing. In our world today, most of us who sew have sewing machines, if not more than one. We also may have embroidery machines, all sorts of notions and gadgets, access to all sorts of fabric and the freedom to use them any way we like. Here is a story of women risking their lives to sew to provide needed financial help to their family. This book will make you appreciate your freedom to sew. This review is from my Amazon Vine book review.

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The Dressmaker of Khair Khana: Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe
by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon


As a seamstress I was fascinated by this book. When their world has gone mad and life as they know it had changed, the women of Afghanistan found themselves in a peculiar situation. They could not leave their homes without a male escort, they could not work out, they had a new dress code that was so old fashioned many of the women had to borrow clothes to leave their home as they didn’t have the proper dress to satisfy the Taliban. As many of them found that they were widows with children to support they were left in a quandary. How do they support their families, feed their children and keep a roof over their heads and still follow the rules? If they didn’t follow the rules they could be beaten, tortured and killed. For women who were used to going to school (now no longer allowed), holding down jobs, and being able to shop and visit at will, not only were they in financial straights but bored beyond belief. They were essentially under house arrest.

For one family of many daughters, Kamela Sediqi found a way to be productive, earn an income and involve not only her many sisters but other women and girls from her area. She became a seamstress. With one sewing lessons from her married sister that was a tailor, she set up shop and made her first garment. Escorted by her younger brother, she went to the market, avoiding the Taliban soldiers, and took orders for the dresses she and her sisters would make. As someone who has sewed for 40+ years, she did something I would never even think of attempting. But she got orders and took them home and carefully she and her sisters cut the cloth and hand sewed and embroidered the garments. Her business grew, all being secretly done in her home, to the point she was able to hire other women and girls to help her and thus also help with their financial difficulties.

Sewing by lamplight and eventually with sewing machines during the times of infrequent electric power, Kamela and sisters and friends, beat their boredom, supported their families and showed that even when the chips were down, they could succeed against all odds,

I very much enjoyed this book although there were some areas that were confusing, especially the timeline. I was reading the advanced reading copy so I hope someone caught the discrepancies before actual publication. Other than that, it was a very inspirational true story that I enjoyed very much.

The Great Starvation Experiment by Todd Tucker

Whenever my son Ron comes for a visit as he did this past July 4th, we have an official exchange of the books routine within about the first 5 minutes he is here. Of the 4 books he brought me this time, I started reading with this one, The Great Starvation Experiment: The heroic Men Who Starved so that Millions Could Live by Todd Tucker.


The Great Starvation Experiment was intended to see what is the best way to help war-torn starving refugees or any large group of people that have had their food sources stopped for so long due to natural disasters, etc. that they are literally starving. The experiment itself was started during World War II but didn’t finish in time for the end of the war, obviously you don’t keep a war going just for the sake of experimentation. During the draft of World War II the powers that be tried to keep Conscientious Objectors out of sight and busy on conservation projects or helping out places like mental hospitals. But for some pacifists, it was not enough that they could do for the cause of peace. Then Dr. Keys, the inventor of the K rations, came up with the plan for the starvations experiment. He found close to 40 conscientious objectors who were willing, at great personal sacrifice, to become part of an experiment on starvation and how to restore starving people to health.

After finding his initial young, physically fit men, Dr. Keys spent the first three months of the experiment, gathering health data on their general fitness and how many calories it took for them to maintain their normal weight. The men on average were 5’ 10” tall and weight on average 165 pounds. The had to walk 22 miles a week on top of the walking involved to get to the dining room and the exercises on the fitness machines that measured them. At this point the men were consuming around 3000 calories a day depending on the man as each diet was structured individually to the man’s size.

The next six months was the starvation part of the experiment. From the very first day of the this part of the experiment the men were cut down to around 1500 calories a day plus all the water and coffee they wanted to drink. They had to maintain their physical exercise including the 22 miles of walking a week. The exercise to simulate the activities of people having to rebuild their lives following war or natural disasters. The men dropped on average 25% of their body weight during the six months. As the men got hungrier and hungrier, a buddy system had to be instituted to be sure that no one was cheating on the diet. If they dropped a pea while eating, they grabbed it up off the floor and ate it. Any food given to them was not wasted and the men literally licked their plates clean. As the weeks and months moved along, they began to care less and less about world events and the only things they could focus on was food and looking forward to the end of the 6 month starvation phase and getting to recovery phase.

However the recovery phase wasn’t what they were expecting. This was actually the most important part of the experiment as Dr. Keys needed to see how many calories it took for a starving person to regain their strength and interest in life so the men were divided into groups and only got intermittent increases in their diets of a set amount of calories. Although the men slowly began to gain strength back, they were still focused on food, especially those who were only getting an extra 400 calories a day. The war was winding down and so was the experiment time when Dr. Keys realized that what the men needed to recover fully was food and as much as they wanted. When given back their full diets, the men quickly recovered their strength and interest in usual activities.

Space does not allow me to tell more about the book. It is fascinating reading and I urge you to read it. This was an experiment that due to the special circumstances of it, can never be repeated again. The data and book published from this study is still the authoritative guide to starvation and eating. These were immensely brave men who went through this experiment. In its way it does answer many things about diets for me. No wonder when someone tries to go on a 1000-1500 calorie diet that have trouble succeeding, as they are literally trying to starve their body to death and the body will refuse to cooperate. All the person will do is think about food and will do whatever it takes to eat food.

While this book deals with medical problems and issues, it is discussed in layman's words and is very understandable. You will find the individual stories of the men fascinating and enjoy hearing the updates on them as most lived to old age.