BOOK REVIEW Sally Kirk: Hope for the Autism Spectrum: A Mother and Son Journey of Insight and Biomedical Intervention Jessica Kingsley Publishers, London & Philadelphia, 2008, 431 pp, ISBN 978-1-84310-894-8, $24.95 (hard cover) Mojdeh Bayat Published online: 16 June 2009 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009 Hope for the Autism Spectrum is a mother’s account of the process of diagnosis and intervention of her son with Asperger’s Syndrome. The author, Kirk, painstakingly details the day to day accounts of her son Will’s devel- opment from early childhood through adolescence. She recounts her own struggles with understanding character- istics and treatment of her son’s disorder. When Will was 5 he was misdiagnosed with ADHD, and several years later he received a diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome (AS). Through a slow paced chronicles of the author’s varied and sometimes negative experiences with medical specialists and baffled educators and school personnel, Kirk offers her own exhaustive explanations and interpretations of her son’s disorder. After Will received a diagnosis of AS, in 2004, Kirk attended a conference by Defeat Autism Now (DAN), a group of physicians—part of the Autism Research Institute (ARI)—who are committed to promoting alternative treat- ments and therapies of autism. There, for the first time, she became acquainted with the DAN researchers’ biomedical theories of ASD and related treatments. Kirk then embarked on a study of the DAN researchers’ work, and discovered their analyses and explanations of autism ‘‘enlightening’’: I stopped thinking of him [Will] as a mystery, a puzzle that could not be solved. Instead, I began to view him as someone who was not physically well. The implications were huge. I had not noticed poor health initially, but who knows what I might find if I were to dig a little deeper? This new outlook was enlightening and empowering. It reminded me of getting my first pair of eyeglasses. Suddenly, there was so much more to see and investigate that I had never noticed before… Suddenly, there were numerous opportunities where there had been so few only a moment before (p. 134). The story continues with Will being taken to a DAN physician for testing and evaluation, the results of which confirmed various suspected biomedical problems includ- ing allergies and mercury poisoning. Kirk’s son began receiving a number of recommended interventions that according to the author lead to a ‘‘rapid gain’’ during the first 18 months of treatment, then a more ‘‘subtle’’ gain, which she describes as similar to the experiences of those who try to ‘‘lose weigh where the first five pounds came off faster and more easily than the next five (p. 105).’’ Kirk points out to gains in a several areas of her son’s devel- opment and functioning, such as attention, social skills, memory, comprehension, physical endurance, etc. Indeed the list and descriptions of progress made by Will in a short time is impressive. From this point forward, the author devotes over 200 pages of her book to a much detailed yet overly simplistic explanation of DAN’s biomedical theories and interven- tions for autism. In writing this book, the author has exclusively used—and makes recommendations of—the literature written or promoted by DAN researchers. The range of topics varies from epidemiology and causal the- ories of autism to an analysis of policy-making in vaccine’s safety. There are pages after pages of descriptions, ratio- nalizations, justifications and finally recommendations related to biomedical treatment of autism. Especially notable are the chapters on mercury poison- ing in autism (pp. 214–257), and the section on MMR M. Bayat (&) School of Education, Schmitt Academic Center # 334, DePaul University, 2320 N. Kenmore Ave., Chicago, IL 60614, USA e-mail: mbayat@depaul.edu 123 J Autism Dev Disord (2010) 40:130–131 DOI 10.1007/s10803-009-0779-3