Discovering My Autism: Apologia Pro Vita Sua (With Apologies to Cardinal Newman). By Edgar Schneider
Jessica Kingsley Pub, 1999. ISBN: 1853027243
Ed was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1932 and graduated from the High School of Music and Art (1950), and The City College of New York (1954). His graduate study was in physics and mathematics, but he is interested also in music, art, literature, languages, history, philosophy, theology, politics, and economics.
Laura Fransella reviewed Ed’s book for the Times Educational Supplement, 23 April 1999: “Edgar Schneider is a highly articulate former mathematician and computer programmer. He discovered his Autism in middle age, after being misdiagnosed as schizophrenic for many years. Schneider’s detailed and dispassionate account of his Autism deserves a wide audience. He explains his life as an emotional loner, his need to intellectualise feelings such as love in order to experience them, and his use of his self- knowledge to help others in a way which will inform and enlighten those concerned with high-functioning Autism and Asperger Syndrome. He describes the implications of his emotional deficit, comparing it to a missing faculty such as blindness. It is a moving and inspiring book. By the end, one understands a great deal more about Schneider’s country.”