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What to Read: Savage Girls and Wild Boys by Michael Newton
Several years ago, when I was working in a used bookstore in North Carolina, I came across a copy of Genie by Russ Rymer. To say that this book changed me, profoundly, is not an overstatement. Not only did it spark my abiding desire in linguistics, but Genie herself is harrowing, inescapable.
Michael Newton devotes a whole chapter of his book on feral children to her story. Savage Girls and Wild Boys is a fascinating book. It's also powerfully moving. Newton is an elegant, thoughtful writer, and he displays an incredible sympathy for his subjects. I interviewed him last year. The last question I asked him was whether or not writing this book changed his understanding of what it means to be human. This was his reply:
There are two answers to that. In the course of thinking about the issue philosophically, as I wrote the book, I came to the conclusion that being human meant being socialthat we are by nature an artificial animaland that human life exists in society. I was also aware that I'd reached at the end the point that the carers and educators of these children had reached at the beginningand that these children, although clearly human, didn't fit the definition.The second answer is that increasingly I began to see that the question didn't matter: Clearly, these children are human, and we know a human being when we see one, no matter what physical or psychological damage they've undergone. And I began to feel that being human is something we do with other people, not a solitary thing, but a relationshipthat it exists in an exchange of care, kindness, connection, a reciprocal sense of another's presencein other words, in love.
April 1, 2004 | Permalink
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