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Directed by PAUL MAZURSKY Screenplay by PAUL MAZURSKY and JOSH GREENFELD...
...CHILD CALLED NOAH by Josh Greenfeld. A father's account of caring for an autistic child, told with extraordinary tact, and a quiet outrage against fate and the medical system...
Diagnosis proved difficult, expensive and exasperating. Psychologists tended to classify Noah as retarded. Neurologists generalized about brain damage. Terms such as schizophrenia and autism seemed to cover all the ground but never really defined any of it. "The medical profession," Greenfeld writes, "was merely playing Aristotelian nomenclature and classification games at our expense." Considering that 33 of every 1,000 children born in the U.S. are or become severely retarded or disturbed, the cost in money and parental nerves must be enormous...
They went the rounds, from psychiatrists to chiropractors. Most treatments, however, were only shots in the dark. Private facilities offered little hope. State agencies came muffled in bureaucratic cotton, or their funds were frozen in vague categories for the handicapped that excluded Noah. Greenfeld's assessment of the situation: "Have a crazy kid and get to understand the gut meaning of a society...
...date, Noah has made some measurable progress. Occasionally he blurts a word or flashes a gesture, indicating a slim connection to this world. But it is likely, as he grows older and harder to handle, that he will have to be institutionalized. It is a prospect that the Greenfelds view with conflicting dread and relief. For as Greenfeld tactfully conveys in this moving collection of a year's journal entries, the family of any abnormal child is almost equally victimized. With a novelist's skill and perceptions, Greenfeld tells not only of the daily burden of Noah...