3 out of 4 stars
Share This Review
This is a philosophical book on how to search for knowledge. It is titled That Place of Knowledge and falls under the category of Other Fiction. It is a short story by Philip Alan Shalka. What makes this work great is the fact that the author is an autistic boy who is only 15 years of age.
The story is told through the eyes of Philip’s guide dog, Sabre. In his quest to seek knowledge Philip and Sabre were magically brought back in time and transported to ancient Greek. There they met Aristotle, the great Greek Philosopher.
The subject matter is rather deep for a 15-year-old. But I love the way Aristotle guides Philip in finding out for himself answers to numerous questions that he had. He teaches Philip to persevere in his quest to gain deeper knowledge of everything around him.
Aristotle encourages Philip to look at every subject matter from numerous angles. He helped him see how two minds can make different conclusion from the same set of circumstances. It is important to look deeper into a matter rather than just see what is on the surface. Seek knowledge and learn more of everything. Learn to improve your thinking skills along the way. Everyone’s perspective is unique.
We need to focus on the bigger questions of life. One of the key messages of this book is we need to learn to appreciate the situation we are in no matter how difficult it is. This book teaches the moral value of diversity and how to appreciate other people who may be different from us.
I would strongly recommend this book for children in their formative years. It can also be used as a reading material in an elementary English language class. This work should be quite an inspiration for children who lack language skills. The story development is well structured and the vocabulary used is simple which makes this work very readable. Grammatically this book is quite easy to follow. There is hardly any spelling mistake. The only spelling error that I found is on page 7, line 14 - “Philip walked into to the city.”
For a person with autism it takes a lot of focus to write a story of 100 words. Philip Alan Shalka managed to write close to 10,000 words. That is an amazing achievement. I rate this book with 3 out of 4 stars. I’m giving it a high rating because of the inspirational effort that I believe has gone in producing this piece of work.
******
That Place of Knowledge
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
Like March Reviewer's review? Post a comment saying so!
