Out of Silence

Ian Drummond spoke his first words at the age of eighteen months. In the days and then years that followed, there would be no others. Diagnosed as autistic, he fell into a world of silence, his life shaped by sudden screaming, inexplicable fears, and obsessive rituals. This mesmerizing and inspiring book follows Ian and his family as they valiantly struggle to restore his speech. But as told by Russell Martin, the acclaimed writer who is also Ian's uncle, Out of Silence is also a learned and often poetic investigation of language itself, a book that draws on disciplines from neurophysiology to linguistics in search of the elusive miracle that some people think is the defining feature of our species.