"A picture book biography on prominent autistic scientist and animal rights activist Temple Grandin"--

This second edition of Beyond The Wall is an autobiographical account that gives a rare, detailed and warm insight into the life of someone with Asperger Syndrome. Shore relates his personal and professional experiences in a simple and open manner, creating an informative, user-friendly text that sheds new light on the trials and tribulations of those with Asperger Syndrome. Shore does not only give his personal view within this book, but also gives family events and background, whilst connecting his own experiences to recent research, making it of equal interest to both individuals and professionals.

'It has taken me several years of exploration, but I am at a place now where I see autism as neither an affliction nor a superpower. It's just the blueprint for who I am. There is no cure, but that's absolutely fine by me. To cure me of my autism would be to cure me of myself.' During the first thirty years of her life, comedy script writer Sara Gibbs had been labelled a lot of things - a cry baby, a scaredy cat, a spoiled brat, a weirdo, a show off - but more than anything else, she'd been called a Drama Queen. No one understood her behaviour, her meltdowns or her intense emotions. She felt like everyone else knew a social secret that she hadn't been let in on; as if life was a party she hadn't been invited to. Why was everything so damn hard? Little did Sara know that, at the age of thirty, she would be given one more label that would change her life's trajectory forever. That one day, sitting next to her husband in a clinical psychologist's office, she would learn that she had never been a drama queen, or a weirdo, or a cry baby, but she had always been autistic. Drama Queen is both a tour inside one autistic brain and a declaration that a diagnosis on the spectrum, with the right support, accommodations and understanding, doesn't have to be a barrier to life full of love, laughter and success. It is the story of one woman trying to fit into a world that has often tried to reject her and, most importantly, it's about a life of labels, and the joy of ripping them off one by one.

When Allen Shawn and his twin sister, Mary, were two, she began exhibiting signs of what would be diagnosed many years later as autism. At the age of eight, with almost no warning, her parents sent Mary to a residential treatment center, to never live at home again. Fifty years later, Shawn realized that his fate was inextricably linked to his sister's, and that their natures were far from being different.