Louder Than Words

I just finished Jenny McCarthy's book Louder Than Words, which is the story of how she helped pull her son from the intense clutches of autism. Although I have never cared much for her public persona, I was interested to read this because of some of the similarities that exist between autism and Sensory Processing Disorder (which my son has). I tend to be a fast reader, so I almost always prefer to get a "hard copy" and read the book at my own pace. However, we mistakenly reserved the Book-on-CD version from the library, so I ended up listening to this story instead.

Overall, I thought that it was a worthwhile book, but I actually do wish that I'd read it instead of listened to it. I shouldn't have been surprised, but she put a fair number of expletives in her writing (particularly the f-bomb), and it made me a tad uncomfortable to hear the narrator throwing those words out there so often! There are also some stretches where she seems to repeat herself a lot, and I would have just skimmed over those parts, had I had the book in my hands. She has a somewhat childlike way of writing (lots of simple sentences), which was magnified by being read out loud, so--again--it probably would come off better on paper than on audio.

Aside from these criticisms, it was definitely heartbreaking, and mildly inspirational, to hear what their family went through, as well as oddly comforting to note the similarities in places to some of the issues we've faced with our own son. It raises some VERY interesting points regarding diet and overall health, which I think--for many reasons--needs to be examined much more thoroughly by the general public (but I'll save my soapbox speech on that for another post!). I think that the impact of her story would have been much stronger if she had reigned in her compulsion to pat herself excessively on the back. I did really appreciate all of the resources that were listed at the end of the book, and I intend to check out the hard copy of the book from the library at some point, in order to look into those websites, etc.

Have YOU read it? What did you think? Leave a comment and tell us! Here's what I thought:

Story: B

Writing Style: C

Ease of Read: A-

Appropriate for Children?: NO

Overall Grade: B-