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Product Description
"As the French revolutionaries begin time anew with year one of the new calendar, a feral child, who has somehow survived on his own in the wild, is delivered into the hands of Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, a doctor and teacher of deaf children in Paris...Readers will be mesmerized and even stirred by the questions Gerstein raises and attempts to answer."-Pointer/Kirkus Reviews
Amazon.com Review
In 1800, just after the French Revolution, two hunters emerged from the forest of Aveyron carrying a pole between them. From it dangled a creature--a wild pig? A scrawny bear? The villagers were astonished to realize that this creature was a human child--filthy, naked, and mute--who had lived all his life alone in the woods like an animal. What could be learned by studying the mind of this completely unsocialized being? A committee of learned scientists concluded that he was an idiot and unteachable. But a little-known young doctor, Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, was convinced that he could teach the boy, whom he named Victor, to feel, think, and speak.
The fascinating, true story of the failed education of the "Savage of Aveyron" has been the subject of many nonfiction studies and of the 1970 film by Francois Truffaut, The Wild Child. Mordicai Gerstein further explores this intriguing subject in Victor (and also in a picture book for 4- to 8-year-olds, The Wild Boy). The turbulent years of Itard's attempt to humanize the feral boy are described from the viewpoints of the obsessive but compassionate doctor; his housekeeper, the warm-hearted Madame Guerin; the young housemaid Julie who fears the wild boy's nascent sexuality; and Victor himself, whose thoughts are a stream of sensory images entirely unbound by any perception of selfhood. Older teens will be fascinated by this strange and touching story and the many questions it raises about what it means to be human. (Ages 12 and older) --Patty Campbell
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