fannywrites

Reviews

This is my first book review.

 

Title: Temple Grandin

How The Girl Who Loved Cows Embraced Autism And Changed The World

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012

Author: Sy Montgomery

Word count: 23907

Grades 4-8

 

 

Sy Montgomery is a natural first and foremost. She’s an author of adult and children non-fiction that teaches and entertains.  She has written about the octopus, the great apes, and the dolphin among other animals. The only book she has written about a human is the biography of autistic Temple Grandin. Probably Montgomery was compelled to write this book because Temple loves cows. I’m sure Montgomery loves cows too.

I had watched an award-winning documentary about Temple Grandin. It spiked an interest in her extraordinary story. Now that I’m writing biographies (picture books and middle grade), I need a mentor text and this book is the perfect one.

 

There are many B/W and color personal photos of her childhood, contraptions Grandin designed to calm herself, and her chute systems to calm the cattle. Her detailed blueprints of cattle pens are reproduced in the book.

 

Sy Montgomery captures what is in Grandin’s autistic mind as she is bullied in school as a child and teenager.  Her heightened senses of sounds and details bring her information that she cannot process. She fears she would go mad.

What rescues her is a visit to her aunt’s Arizona ranch. She loves riding the horses and watching the cattle. She observes that the calves are calmer in the cattle chute that is closed as it squeezes their bodies snuggly for vaccination. Later, she designs a squeeze machine to calm herself.

 

After Grandin graduates from college, she goes on to graduate school to study animal science. She becomes a premier designer of buildings and equipment that handle livestock in a humane way. She is a professor of Animal Sciences at Colorado State University. She and her students work to improve the lives of animals raised for food.

 

Grandin wrote her autobiography, which I haven’t read yet. This book takes us into Grandin’s extraordinary mind of an autistic person. The way Montgomery writes about this mind, I can hear the voice of Grandin, how she can’t relate a person’s expression to feelings. Or how she speaks bluntly and hurts people’s feeling.

 

There are other middle grade books about Grandin. A more recent one is by Annette Wood, published in 2017.

 

I highly recommend this one by Montgomery. The print is large and it’s an easy read. It’s well researched and written. I only hope I can do as well with the biographies I will be writing.