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Title: To Siri, with Love

Subtitle: A mother, her autistic son, and the kindness of a machine

Author: Judith Newman

Narrator: Sarah Borges

Format: Unabridged

Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins

Language: English

Release date: 08-24-17

Publisher: Quercus

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Personal Memoirs

Publisher's Summary:

No one would consider Judith Newman's domestic life normal. She and her husband keep separate apartments - his filled with twin grand pianos, as befits a former opera singer, hers packed with the clutter and chaos of twin adolescent boys conceived late in life. And one of those boys is Gus, her sweet, complicated, autistic 13-year-old.

With honesty and humour, To Siri, with Love chronicles one year in the life of Gus and the family around him - a family with the same crazy ups and downs as any other. And at the heart of the book lies Gus' passionate friendship with Siri, Apple's 'intelligent personal assistant'. Unlike her human counterparts, Siri always has the right answers to Gus' incessant stream of questions about the intricacies of national rail schedules or box turtle varieties, and she never runs out of patience. She always makes sure Gus enunciates and even teaches him manners by way of her warm yet polite tone and her programmed insistence on civility.

Equal parts funny and touching, this is a book that will make your heart brim and then break it. Warm, wise and always honest, Judith Newman shows us a new world where artificial intelligence is beginning to meet emotional intelligence - a world that will shape our children in ways both wonderful and unexpected.

Critic Reviews:

"A moving and witty memoir with a big heart." (Nigella Lawson)

Members Reviews:

This book is a grotesque invasion of a child's privacy, should have never seen the light of day

To Siri With Love is a highly contentious book that has sparked significant public conflict between the author and the autistic community. I will review the book here and detail some of the reception of the book, which speaks volumes about the issues that have been raised about the book itself.

Before examining the content in detail, however, I would like to start by immediately addressing the most significant issue with the book, and it is an issue that effectively renders all other criticism moot: the author, Judith Newman, has written a tell-all about her 13 year old son. It includes intimate details about his masturbatory habits, a long litany of what Newman sees as intractable impairments, his humiliations and a great deal of, sadly often inaccurate, interpretation of his behaviors by Newman. Her son was/is not of an age, when he could understand the implications of this book or give his consent.

This book effectively strips her son of privacy and dignity in an extremely public way (New York Times best seller list!), and he will never be able to truly recover these. His struggles with his disability, his most embarrassing moments, his humiliations have now been put on offer for public consumption. Every potential employer, lover or friend will easily be able to connect the dots and have access to this information. In a world where prejudice and a lack of empathy for autistics means that only 15% of autistics classified as âhigh functioningâ (a problematic label unto itself) are able to find work and support themselves (despite being able to do the work in question), this book deprives him of the right to withhold his diagnosis or mask his differences in order to have a fighting chance at an independent life. It outs him. In perpetuity. Books have a long shelf life.