Bernard Rimland deserves tremendous credit for his work on autism -- he was the one who showed that Leo Kanner and Bruno Bettelheim were wrong in blaming autism on "refrigerator mothers."

Then he joined a cult.

Oh, I don't mean he started going to Sunday morning meetings in someone's basement, or any such. But he went from being a serious researcher to a guy who was obsessed with goofball ideas. He started looking at vitamins and nutrition and other quack cures -- the forerunner of the anti-vax movement.

I bought this book because I wanted to see some of Rimland's work. Instead, I got Rimland's cult.

To be clear, Rimland did not write this book; he contributed only one chapter. But a lot of really bad stuff is in here. As I write (early 2016), a study has just come out that finds that gluten does not make autism worse. But that's in here, too. I can't test every claim in this book, but there is a lot that hasn't stood the test of time, and very little that looks as if it was well-founded even in the 1990s. It seems that the urge to find a simple explanation for autism, even if it's wrong, is not a new thing.... ( )