The Sound of a Miracle

Movingly but without self-pity, Stehli here recounts how, after years of ineffectual medical treatment, she turned to Swiss autistic children's specialist Guy Berard for counsel on her troubled young daughter Georgie; he attributes the unresponsive or violent behavior of the autistic to a painful, sometimes frightening oversensitivity to certain frequencies of sound--present even in a mother's voice. Berard's auditory therapy helps to adjust and correct distortion of the patient's hearing to acceptable levels. His program's success is vouched for in an afterword by California autism specialist Bernard Rimland--and in the ``miracle'' case of Stehli's daughter--now a 25-year-old graduate student. The book will be enormously helpful to parents and care-givers of autistic children, although as Rimland cautions, ``There is no treatment that is uniformly or fully effective.'' First serial to Reader's Digest; Literary Guild and Dobuleday Book Club alternatives. (Jan.)