The Horse Boy
When his son Rowan was diagnosed with autism, Rupert Isaacson was devastated, afraid he might never be able to communicate with his child. But when Isaacson, a lifelong horseman, rode their neighbor’s horse with Rowan, Rowan improved immeasurably. He was struck with a crazy idea: why not take Rowan to Mongolia, the one place in the world where horses and shamanic healing intersected? THE HORSE BOY is the dramatic and heartwarming story of that impossible adventure. In Mongolia, the family found undreamed of landscapes and people, unbearable setbacks, and advances beyond their wildest dreams. This is a deeply moving, truly one-of-a-kind story–of a family willing to go to the ends of the earth to help their son, and of a boy learning to connect with the world for the first time.
The Long Ride Home – Book
The long awaited sequel to The Horse Boy. Rowan came back from the shamans in Mongolia a changed boy. The three most debilitating effects of his autism – his incontinence, his endless tantruming, and his inability to make friends – were gone. But a year almost to the day since Rowan’s improvement he started regressing: the accidents and tantrums reappeared, terrifying his father Rupert. Something had to be done. Father and son embarked on a new quest, journeying from the bushmen of Namibia to the coastal rainforests of Queensland, Australia and finally to the Navajo reservations of the American southwest, where Rowan was transformed – they had begun the Long Ride Home.
The Healing Land – Book
The Healing Land is the book that paved the way for the Horse Boy. Tipped as a “New York Times Notable Book’, when it came out in 2003, the book chronicles Rupert’s extraordinary journey into the mind and heart of the original culture on planet earth; the Bushmen of Southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert. It’s a personal story – Rupert’s South African family is related by marriage to the Bushmen and this connection leads him into first their fight for their ancestral lands, and then into their magical world of healing. Because of this book, this journey, Rupert had to bring a delegation of Bushmen to the United Nations in 2004. Some of the members of that delegation were trained healers – shamans – in their own culture. They met Rowan and offered to ‘work’ on him. It was because of the extraordinary results that this work made on Rowan, combined with those of the horse Betsy, that made Rupert think to take his son to a place that combined horses and this kind of shamanic healing – Mongolia. To understand The Horse Boy, you have to read the Healing Land. And as an adventure in its own right, The Healing Land is a magical, cant-put-down read.
The Horse Boy – Movie
The Horse Boy does more than chronicle Rowan and his parents’ journey across the vast, wild landscape of Mongolia. It delves into the strange world of autism itself, the relationship between humans and animals and between different cultures and different ways of being (autistic vs. normal, or “neuro-typical”), and the nature of healing. Audiences hear the varied theories on autism from the experts in the field, well-known researchers of autism such as Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen of Cambridge University; Dr. Temple Grandin, recovered autist and professor of animal behavior at Colorado State University; and anthropologist and researcher Roy Richard Grinker of George Washington University. But above all, The Horse Boy tells the story of a couple that goes to the end of the earth to find a way into their son’s life.
The Wild Host - Book
The History and Meaning of the Hunt (The Derrydale Press Foxhunters’ Library) A beautifully illustrated history of hunting; a meditation on the meaning of hunting spiritually and culturally; and a very personal hunting account. Destined to be controversial, Rupert Isaacson justifies and celebrates hunting while acknowledging the realities of a modern world of heightened compassion.