Dr. Harold “Hackie” Reitman’s Aspertools is a book that throws the book at stereotypes. However, before we get to the specifics, permit me to note that the author himself is someone who defies stereotypes. After all, Dr. Reitman is a former professional boxer who boasted a heavyweight right hand. He was also a renowned orthopedic surgeon, who used the same hands that produced hurt to remove it by repairing torn ligaments and bones. Again, he is not your stereotypical doctor or boxer, or, for that matter, author.
I first encountered Dr. Reitman in the corridors of boxing. I was writing a story about the legendary boxing trainer Angelo Dundee. Over time, I was blessed to develop a friendship with Angelo, and in our almost daily phone conversations he kept pestering me, “You have to meet my friend Hackie Reitman. You two would be great pals.”
One does not become a Hall of Fame boxing trainer without being something of a master psychologist. Angelo was right; Hackie and I hit it off right away, in part because he is such a warm, compassionate, and open individual, which, by the way, are qualities that resonate throughout the pages you’re about to turn.
In our first conversations, one of the issues that Hackie shared was his ongoing education about Asperger’s. This was an education that he received slowly and often painfully as he came to understand that his daughter Rebecca was an “Aspie.”
The good doctor struggled mightily to understand the landscape of Rebecca’s mind and feelings. At one point, after Rebecca graduated from college, her father tried to push her along the career path of becoming a teacher. Resisting, Rebecca instructed him, “Everyone’s brain is different. Brains are like snowflakes—no two are alike.”
While it might seem like a contradiction, since this is a book of practical advice for people dealing with a distinct set of challenging thought and behavior patterns, Rebecca’s observation that “No two brains are exactly alike” is perhaps the fulcrum of this book. The philosophical point (and there are many between these covers) is that with all the lush diversity of humankind, we have to be alive to the fact that some people experience the same thing in radically different ways.
For instance, in the first chapter “Anxiety,” Hackie confides that there were times when he reacted angrily to Rebecca’s reluctance to enter into seemingly social situations that he saw as only positive. He thought she was simply being stubborn. But then he came to understand that some people do not have a ready store of knowledge as to how to read and react to others. More likely than not, many of these same folks are also hypersensitive to ordinary stimuli such as light and noise.
After learning his lesson, a now enlightened Hackie realized that “a major source of anxiety for an Aspie is being placed in a social gathering or a new situation.”
In the book, he prods us to imagine, “If you had to keep solving the same problems you solved the day before, if your every interaction with another human being seemed like rocket science, wouldn’t you be anxious? And if you were always aware that your anxiety could escalate to a full meltdown, wouldn’t that make you even more anxious?”
As a professor of philosophy, I have taken some instruction from Aspertools. Hackie has brought me to a more profound grasp of the facts that one size does not fit all when it comes to learning, and that what one student can handle with aplomb might cause another to grind his teeth with anxiety.
Moreover, the chapter on hyper-interests (more commonly known as “obsessions”), has helped me to be more patient with my students who come to a liberal arts college such as the one that I teach at, and nevertheless get locked into what seems like a rigid and limited set of subjects.
It is easy to preach about the importance of appreciating different ways of thinking, but this book practices what it preaches. At many junctures, we have the author’s experience of a situation reflected on by a trained teacher of Aspies and then balanced by Rebecca’s experience of the same. There are number of points at which Hackie presents us with a specific situation, followed by the mind- and heart-expanding exercise, “Imagine you are an Aspie.”
Hackie Reitman is a perennial problem solver. There is little theory between these covers. This is preeminently practical Baedeker, brimming with vivid examples, sage counsel, and boundless good will.