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Lead book review

Did Hans Asperger save children from the Nazis — or sell them out?

Reviewing Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes, Simon Baron-Cohen, our leading authority on autism, wonders what really went on in Asperger’s children’s clinic in ‘Aryanised’ 1940s Vienna

12 September 2015

9:00 AM

12 September 2015

9:00 AM

Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter about People who Think Differently Steve Silberman

Allen & Unwin, pp.544, £16.99, ISBN: 9781760113636

Steve Silberman’s stunning new book looks across history, back to Henry Cavendish, the 18th-century natural scientist who discovered hydrogen, Hugo Gernsbach, the early-20th-century inventor and pioneer of amateur ‘wireless’ radio, and countless other technically brilliant but socially awkward, eccentric non-conformists, members of the ‘neurotribe’ we now call the autism spectrum.

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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £14.99 Tel: 08430 600033. Simon Baron-Cohen is Director of Cambridge University’s Autism Research Centre and author of Mindblindness and Zero Degrees of Empathy.

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