Book Review: Visual Thinking by Temple Grandin

Rating: 2 stars of 5

I really wanted to like this book but I found it dry, self-aggrandizing, lacking on the research front, and sprinkled with gratingly dated ideas about autism.

There were also a few other elements I found off-putting:

- The way Grandin presented Thomas Edison, given what we know about how he stole / took credit for / patented inventions created by other people.

- The way she kept insinuating that she could have prevented numerous, tragic natural disasters. This often came across as quite callous. Sometimes the insinuation was that she herself would have known something better than the trained professionals involved (she also describes several other situations that demonstrate such audacity on her part); other times the insinuation was that someone who thinks like she does would have known better (the latter could be valid, perhaps, but I found it odd that she would just assume no one who had been there was a visual thinker).

- She spent a lot of time lauding male billionaires throughout the book.

- The writing felt quite disorganized and repetitive at times.

Overall, it just fell short of what I had hoped it would be, and it leaned a lot more toward memoir than I expected based on the title. I do think Grandin makes some compelling points about schooling and education, but I could have done without a lot of the rest of the content.

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