Much of this book is devoted to understanding how people with autism live in the world. In meeting with his former schoolmates and those with whom they live, Nazeer has a template not only for describing their particular lives but for thinking more broadly about autism. There are elegant descriptions of autistic individuals' needs for local coherence and the challenges they face in communicating and relating to others. The book debunks the notion that autism necessarily entails all that its name suggests (an emotionally autonomous existence, a complete inability to relate or want to relate to other people); Nazeer focuses instead on the serious and sometimes severe interpersonal challenges while always stressing how much hard work has gone into their sucesses. Nazeer is unsentimental about his accomplishments, as well as what Andre, Randall and Chris have achieved; he discusses at length the possibility that autism has played a role in their relative successes as well as the possibility that it has hindered them (and he also recognises that autism is a spectrum and that they are very much on one end of it).

By talking very specifically about his colleagues and then thinking about their experiences in a broader context, Nazeer is also able to write very incisive passages about the performative nature of conversation, the question of "genius", play, and relationships, with observations that are eye-opening and stimulating. The book itself is not "autistic" but is intimately related to the outside world and far from indifferent to the lives of others. Ultimately, "Send in the Idiots" is about relationships; this book is very much an opening into an inner world that people all too often think either does not exist or cannot be entered.

Those interested in theories about autism will find useful discussions here about etiology and treatment, and there is an excellent section where Nazeer queries theory of mind and mindblindness as it relates to autism; similarly, those interested in the effects of mental illness on families will find sympathetic analyses of family members and friends and their involvement in the lives of autistic individuals, especially in Nazeer's kind treatment of the story of Elizabeth and her parents.