Reviews

"A riveting account of living with autism...At times, he is quite poetic, especially when he writes about numbers...Transcends the disability-memoir genre."-- "Kirkus Reviews"

"It was fascinating to read how the mind of a mathematical savant is both similar to and different from my visual brain. Daniel thinks in patterns of color, shapes, and relationships between numbers, instead of in photo-realistic images. This book is a must-read for anybody who is interested in how the mind works."-- Temple Grandin, bestselling author of "Animals in Translation" and "Thinking in Pictures"

"Something in the way that Mr. Tammet describes the beautiful, aching, hallucinatory process of arriving at his answers illuminates the excitement of all cogitation."-- "The New York Times"

"The probability of someone having both synesthesia and autism is incredibly small -- about 1 in 10,000. Are Daniel's talents the result of his two rare syndromes coming together in one person? His synesthesia gives him a richly textured, multisensory form of memory, and his autism gives him the narrow focus on number and syntactic patterns. The resulting book is a story of a life that is both remarkable and inspiring."-- Simon Baron-Cohen, author of "Mindblindness" and "The Essential Difference"

"This is a concise book about a very expansive mind. By studying Daniel we may come closer to being able to tap the 'little Rain Man' that exists, perhaps, within us all.Daniel has a heartfelt life mission -- serving as an inspiration for other persons, demonstrating by his own example that such conditions as epilepsy or Asperger's need not always interfere with overall development and potential. Daniel is articulate, soft-spoken, pleasant, polite, gentle, and modest. Those traits shine through in his writing, and his goals mirror most of our own -- becoming closer in our intimate relationships, and becoming closer in our relationships with family and friends as well. Daniel says that numbers are his friends. One comes away from his book with the feeling, through his openness, candor, and reaching out, of having made a new friend as well."-- Darold A. Treffert, MD, author of "Extraordinary People: Understanding Savant Syndrome"