A "ground-breaking" science book has won the UK's top non-fiction award.
Steve Silberman's Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently has scooped the £20,000 2015 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.
The book - the first popular science book to win the prize in its 17-year history - chronicles the history of societal attitudes and responses to autism, a condition that affects millions of people across the globe.
From the clinicians who discovered it, to the MMR vaccine controversy, San Francisco-based Silberman charts the journey of the complex disorder and seeks to answer the question of why there has been a massive rise in diagnoses.
Pulitzer prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum, chair of the judges, presented him with the prize, and said: "Silberman's ground-breaking archival research lays out the intellectual history of the condition we now call 'autism', tracing the evolution of the diagnosis from Nazi Vienna up until the present day, explaining how political and social context shaped scientific and medical perspectives.
"At the same time, Silberman's compassionate journalism explores the impact of popular culture on perceptions of autism, and the impact on the families of those who live with it.
"As a writer of popular science, the first ever to win the Samuel Johnson prize, Silberman also excels at using stories and anecdotes to explain complex medical issues to a wide audience.
"In the end, though, we admired Silberman's work because it is powered by a strongly argued set of beliefs: That we should stop drawing sharp lines between what we assume to be 'normal' and 'abnormal', and that we should remember how much the differently-wired human brain has, can and will contribute to our world.
"He has injected a hopeful note into a conversation that's normally dominated by despair. Neurotribes is tour de force of archival, journalistic and scientific research, both deeply researched and widely accessible."
Toby Mundy, director of the Samuel Johnson Prize, said the work was "a genre-breaking book with a global sweep, by an American author, published by the London imprint of an Australian publishing company".
Silberman is an award-winning investigative reporter and has covered science and cultural affairs for Wired and other national magazines for more than twenty years, with his writing appearing in The New Yorker, TIME, Nature and Salon.
The 2015 shortlist covered a variety of genres, from journalism, philosophy and biography to memoir and science.
Alongside Neurotribes, the other five titles in the running were Jonathan Bate's Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life, Robert Macfarlane's Landmarks, Laurence Scott's The Four-Dimensional Human, Emma Sky's The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq, and Samanth Subramanian's
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here