The history of autism is not one in which expert opinion has covered itself in glory.

But by the time you get to their 40 th chapter, it has become clear why so many autism parents seized upon this conspiracy theory and clung to it so fiercely. Of course Donvan and Zucker certainly don’t endorse the scientifically unfounded belief that vaccines cause autism. While neither as literary nor as searching as, say, Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree, In a Different Key is grounded and sensible, which in the contentious world of autism activism constitutes a kind of grace. They also made him a new, and lifelong, enemy.”) tooled to hook a viewer through a commercial break. They tell it as a series of short profiles, focusing, in classic TV news-magazine style, on plucky heroes beating the odds, and ending many a chapter with the sort of teaser (“The results were shocking, and they made him famous. Triplett enjoyed this rich life instead of spending decades locked up in his own head behind the walls of a place like the Preventorium because his parents refused to docilely follow the recommendations of most experts, and because, as the authors write, he was “accepted, even embraced by the community,” with “a network of people watching out for him, and the chance to live independently, in a home of his own.” This arc mirrors the larger narrative of In a Different Key: For Donvan and Zucker, the story of autism is the story of the heroic determination of parents and the eventual education of the society around them. Mary in particular resisted this dictate, although the Tripletts did briefly place their son in a facility called the Preventorium before thinking better of it and seeking out Kanner. Every doctor his parents consulted insisted that the boy was hopelessly insane and should be institutionalized so that the Triplett family could get on with their lives.

His mother, Mary, worried that Donald’s habit of running out into the street would, during some brief moment when her attention lapsed, get him killed. (He would endlessly repeat the words chrysanthemum, business, and trumpet vine for no discernible reason.) He mostly ignored the people around him-unless he was throwing violent tantrums when aspects of his environment or routine were changed. Triplett, the scion of a leading family in a small Mississippi town, could speak, but what he said made little sense to his parents. It was Kanner who, in the 1940s, identified autism as a condition distinct from both “mental retardation” and schizophrenia, with which it had long been confused. In a Different Key begins and ends with one man: Donald Triplett, the first person diagnosed with autism by Leo Kanner, an American child psychiatrist.

In a different key the story of autism