Duluth Minnesota (OpEdNews) January 13, 2023: In my OEN article "Temple Grandin on Thinking with Words versus Thinking with Images" (dated January 10, 2023), I commented on Temple Grandin's op-ed piece in the New York Times titled "Temple Grandin: Society Is Failing Visual Thinkers, and That Hurts Us All" (dated January 9, 2023).
In the present review essay, I now turn to Temple Grandin's new 2022 autobiographical book, with Betsy Lerner, Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns and Abstractions (Riverhead Books/ Penguin Random House - the world's biggest publisher). In places, this book contains a certain amount of Temple Grandin's personal life-story.
Temple Grandin (born in 1947; Ph.D. in animal science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 1989), who is famous for writing about autism, teaches animal science at Colorado State University.
Now, my favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) of Saint Louis University (SLU), the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri (USA).
Over the years, I took five English courses at SLU from Ong. In addition, I wrote an introductory-level book about Ong's life and eleven of his books and selected essays titled Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication, 2nd ed. (Hampton Press, 2015; 1st ed., 2000).
With the American Jesuit Paul A. Soukup in communications studies at Santa Clara University in northern California, I have co-edited seven Ong-related books (1991, 1992a, 1992b, 1995, 1999, 2002, and 2012).
For a bibliography of Ong's 400 or so distinct publications (not counting translations and reprintings as distinct publications), see Thomas M. Walsh's "Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Bibliography 1929-2006" in the anthology Language, Culture, and Identity: The Legacy of Walter J. Ong, S.J., edited by Sara van den Berg and Thomas M. Walsh (Hampton Press, 2011, pp. 185-245).
But also see my 2017 resource document "A Concise Guide to Five Themes in Walter J. Ong's Thought and to Selected Related Works" that is available online through the University of Minnesota's digital conservancy:
http://hdl.handle.net/11299/189129
In general, I admire Ong's scholarly work because he almost invariably operationally defines and explains the terms he uses.
Now, according to the Wikipedia entry on Temple Grandin, there was an HBO movie about her early life in 2010 - starring the talented Claire Danes as young Temple Grandin (for which she received Emmy, Golden Globe, and Screen Actor Guild Awards). Apart from the HBO movie about Temple Grandin, according to the Wikipedia entry, she has also received certain other forms of popular attention.
Now, as much as I am impressed with Father Ong's scholarly life and especially with his breakthrough insight in the early 1950s (which I discuss below), I admit that an HBO movie about his ambitious research and his breakthrough insight in the early 1950s would probably not be an award-winning hit for the star, to say the least. The various forms of scholarly recognition that Ong received, which I detail in my book about his life and work, while impressive, strike me as earning him far less attention in popular culture in his day, or today, than Temple Grandin has received in her day. Put differently, Ong is a superstar in the scholarly realm, and Temple Grandin is a superstar not only in Colorado, where she teaches, but also in the realm of American popular culture today.
In any event, Temple Grandin's new 2022 autobiographical book, with Betsy Lerner, includes the following parts:
"Introduction" (pp. 1-7);
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