Children with Emerald Eyes

Mira Rothenberg ran a residential school for severely disturbed children for decades and wrote about some of her most challenging cases with both clinical precision and genuine love. The children she describes — some autistic, some profoundly emotionally disturbed — are rendered as fully human, their strange inner worlds taken seriously at a time when institutions mostly gave up on them. Rothenberg was among the first practitioners to distinguish autism from intellectual disability in clinical practice, and that historical significance is real. The content is emotionally harrowing in places, including self-harm and violent episodes, so it is not for casual or young readers. The clinical methods are also now decades old. But as a humanizing, compassionate piece of clinical memoir, it remains moving and historically important.