BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : The Silent Lambs Speak to Mankind : OUT OF SILENCE; A Journey Into Language <i> by Russell Martin</i> ; Henry Holt; $22.50, 300 pages

“We are human,” the poet Marcia Falk once wrote in a scholarly journal, “we need and love language.” But a typesetter’s error turned the phrase into something slightly different: “We need love and language.”

Both statements are true, I realized as I read Russell Martin’s “Out of Silence,” a wholly remarkable book about a family’s struggle to rescue their son from the cruel prison of illness by giving him love and language.

“Out of Silence” is the shattering but curiously upbeat story of young Ian Drummond, the author’s nephew, a bright and healthy toddler who fell into a deep sleep after an ordinary childhood vaccination--and, when he woke up the next day, seemed to be an altogether different child.

“No one could be certain why, but as his interest in speaking suddenly vanished, Ian became strangely terrorized by much of what he encountered,” Martin writes. “Ian lived in self-imposed, self- demanded isolation and in a perplexing kind of quietude, never attempting to speak, his babbling long since forgotten, a boy who once had been about to burst with language now silent except for his screams.”

Ian’s condition was diagnosed as autism, and the family suddenly found itself confronting a baffling medical mystery: What had caused Ian’s sudden descent into mental and emotional chaos, and what might bring him out again? We are given an intriguing clue in a bit of verse that Ian’s father wrote in an effort to express his bewilderment and pain: “Wordless now, a troubled mute / It doesn’t fit, he seems astute.”

On one level, then, “Out of Silence” is a straightforward and plain-spoken account of how Ian and his family coped. Martin writes with both empathy and authority, and he uses Ian’s ordeal as an exploration of what works and what doesn’t in the treatment of autism.

But “Out of Silence” is something more ambitious than a case history, something more exalted: Martin uses Ian’s affliction as an occasion to consider the essential function of language in human development and the destiny of human civilization.

Intriguingly, Martin argues that autism is not “childhood schizophrenia”--indeed, he insists that it is not a mental illness at all. Rather, Martin explains, autism is coming to be regarded an “expressive disorder” that interferes with the powers of communication and leaves its victims stranded inside themselves.

“Researchers . . . maintain that people with autism are neither psychotic nor somehow severely retarded,” he explains, “but instead are the victims of a very deceptive syndrome in which the brain, the cranial nerves, and the muscles of the mouth and throat are unable to coordinate the almost unbelievably sophisticated sequence of events that leads from a thought, an intention to a successfully spoken word.”

Language turned out to be the secret of Ian’s faltering steps toward health. One physician had suggested behavior modification therapy for Ian, another recommended vitamin supplements. But the greatest success came with the use of “augmentative communication,” a series of tools designed to give Ian a way to express himself--American Sign Language, a collection of laminated photographs, a computer screen and keyboard, a portable voice synthesizer.

Martin does not pretty up the particulars of Ian’s story, nor does he soothe us with easy optimism. “I HATTE AUTISM,” the 9-year-old Ian was eventually able to type out on his computer. “ITIS A NIGHTMATRE. SSOMETIMNES I WANTTO DIE.”

But, by the time we read the agonized message that Ian sent to his parents, we already understand that the very fact that he was able to put his fear, pain and grief into words was a triumph of heroic proportions.

So Martin leaves us with a bittersweet sense of Ian’s destiny, but also a deeper understanding of language itself, a richer appreciation of its promise, and a realization that the ability to communicate is a kind of grace.

“Speech propelled us beyond mere communication toward the possibility of a kind of interaction that perhaps we can only call communion--a means of sharing our very celebrations, our darkest dreads, our dreams,” Martin writes. “The legacy is a kind of creature who can reach outside itself, audaciously imagining as much as the universe, inquiring too into things as secret as the soul.”

By the way, even the dust jacket of Martin’s book deserves praise. Featuring a tinted photograph of Ian by his father, Boyce Drummond, and an intriguing design by Raquel Jaramillo, the jacket is simply one of the must beautiful I’ve ever seen. It’s a fitting package for a book of such honesty, beauty and lofty accomplishment.