A Book A Week - Week 41: Why I Jump

**  Fair warning, I get very, very, very cussy below.  If you don't like a lot of bad words spread around like spiteful mayonnaise on an anger sandwich, skip this one and wait until next week.  **

This week's book:
  The Reason I Jump   by Naoki Higashida  -- really by his mother

Grade:   F--      this is a bullshit scam using 'facilitated communication.'  Do not buy this book, it's charlatanism of the highest order.

Fuck this guy, fuck his mother, and fuck his transcriber.  Fuck his Japanese publisher, fuck his American publisher, fuck his English translator and fuck Apple and iTunes for making it available.
   And a very special two-middle-fingers-waaaaaaay-up for Jon Stewart.  Fuck him sideways with a watermelon for giving this awful, despicable, entirely-discredited and thoroughly exposed fraud a fresh start on national cable TV (more on that below).

This book is a fraud.  From start to finish.  Do not buy this or even read it if someone gives it to you, it's pure fakery.

I suspected as much, when I heard about Mr. Higashida.  He's severely autistic, essentially non-verbal, and the means he used to 'write' this book is facilitated communication.  You may have heard about this in the 90's, it's where an assistant - in this case his mother - holds a disabled person's hand or arm, allowing them the smooth control to point to letters or words (or ideograms in Japanese) and make themselves understood.
    The problem is, the disabled person isn't the one doing the pointing.

Study after study after study has proved that facilitated communication is nothing more than the 'facilitator' doing the typing.  With very simple methods it's been demonstrated time and again.  For instance, when the disabled person is shown a picture of a cat, but the facilitator sees a dog, the disabled person types 'dog.'  Or when the facilitator can't see the word, oddly enough the disabled person types something random.
   Even better, the facilitator usually has to be the same person all the time.  If the disabled person really just needed a steady hand it wouldn't matter whose hand it was, or even whether they could see what the disabled person could.  And yet, when the disabled person's special facilitator is taken away, the disabled person stops being able to communicate.  Like when 'psychics' are asked to reproduce their methods in lab settings, the ability just flees them for some reason.  Because they're faking.

Naoki Higashida did not write this book.  His mother did, using long-disproved methods.  For a week I have looked for proof of Mr. Higashida's independence in this matter.  I just need one video, or one reliable first-hand account of him writing on his own, where his mother isn't looking at his alphabet board or a disinterested third party does the facilitating.  I found nothing.  Not a single independently verified instance of Mr. Higashida doing anything like writing.
   ** If someone can provide me this proof, I will gladly retract everything in this review.   I'll start holding my breath now. **

I understand why Mr. Higashida's mother does this.  It was hard enough for me to try to know the mind of the autistic kids at camp and fail, and I only had them for a week, five nights.  The parent of a person locked away into autism craves understanding, they want to know - or feel they know - what's going on with their child.  So they buy into this kind of crap, hoping their child can reveal themselves.
   Facilitated communication tells parents they can know their child, that it's simple and easy, all the child has to do is point.  But it's just a late-20th Century version of spiritualism, nothing but fakery and self-deception.  And so very cruel.  I wouldn't wish the false hope 'facilitated communication' offers on my worst enemy.

Which is where Jon Stewart comes in.  He of 'The Daily Show,' a man who is adept at parsing political speech and asking tough questions, never questioned this book at all.  He took at face value the proposition that a severely autistic man, who can't even be demonstrated to read let alone write, dictated a book word by word.  Jon Stewart researches his comedy assiduously, and picks apart situations to shovel away the bullshit and expose the lies.  But he just sat in awe of this garbage, and whole-heartedly recommended this miserable excuse for book to all his viewers.  Then he crowed about it shooting up the charts, never suspecting that it was complete and utter bullshit.
   So fuck you, Jon Stewart.  Fuck you to Hell and back for all the damage you're going to do to families with autistic kids because you couldn't be bothered to do your homework.  People are going to read 'Why I Jump' and expect their autistic children to be able to make their wishes known using 'facilitated communication.'  At best they'll be heartbroken when it doesn't work, and at worst they'll be victims of their own hope and believe, even for a short time, that their child can actually communicate, before the veil is ripped away and they learn the awful truth.  Fuck you. 

Next week:
 The Lies Of Locke Lamora   by Scott Lynch
A first novel.  I'm kind of hit or miss with first novels, but I've found I like rolling the dice.  Maybe because with the last few I've hit my point.  Some day I'm going to crap out again, though.