The Withering Child

In August of 1990, Gould ( The Greenleaf Fires ), a secondary school English teacher, his wife Jane, an Episcopal priest, and their two young children left their Boston home for a year's sabbatical in England. By November they had returned, hoping to save their five-year-old son's life. Shortly after their arrival in Oxford, the sensitive, stubborn and active Gardner complained of leg and stomach cramps. He was given to vomiting, stopped eating and often screamed from pain. His increasingly desperate parents sought help with little success. Gardner lost nearly a third of his body weight and one night, seemingly resigned to death, he told his father to give his favorite toy to a friend. Gould chronicles the horror of parents watching their child deteriorate. He reports on Gardner's restored health back home: the diagnosis of borderline attention deficit disorder, therapy and his return to school. With this unsentimental, unsensationalized profile, Gould makes an eloquent plea that guardians should see children as individuals with their own rhythms and developmental timetables, and that they understand that children can have problems that are not due to faulty parenting. (Dec.)