From the [UK] Telegraph,  New York Times:

In “The Horse Boy,” an international publishing sensation, a father and travel writer tells the story of a trip to Mongolia in which he says horses and shamans helped alleviate the symptoms of his son’s autism.

Officials at Little, Brown & Company,  which released “The Horse Boy” in the United States Tuesday, say they paid a $1 million advance to Rupert Isaacson before the author and his family left for Mongolia. Booksellers have already placed orders high enough to justify a first printing of 150,000 copies.

The book is to be published in more than 20 languages, and an accompanying documentary that was shown at the Sundance Festival has been bought by the BBC.

“It just touched so many points of interest — helping to heal an autistic child, traveling under difficult circumstances,” said [Michael Pietsch, publisher of Little, Brown]. “Most of all, I felt this was a story entirely driven by the chances you’ll take for love, and I felt, who’s not going to want to read this story when they hear the outlines of it?”

Some skeptical parents and experts say the story gives false hope, but Isaacson says the book “isn’t really saying that shamanism cures autism or horses cure autism;” it just shares a personal story of healing, he says.

View trailer of  the documentary “Over the Hills and Far Away” here.

Earlier posts here.

(New York Times photo)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 9:14 am and is filed under NOT2BEMISSED, autism, books, families, intellectual/developmental disabilities, movies, personal stories, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.