Overview
"As a stutterer who is always afraid of speaking but is rarely able to keep his mouth shut, I have a story to tell.” So writes Marty Jezer in this insightful and invaluable book about stuttering that, by necessity, is also a work about speaking, silences, and the pleasures and pitfalls of everyday communication.With eloquence and passion, Jezer delves into his lifelong struggle with fluent speech. "I live on both sides of the disability dilemma,” he says. "As long as I keep silent, I look like a normal fluent person. But every time I talk, I put this identity on the line. The need to speak and the probability of stuttering are the dominant facts of my life.”This is a book about denial, fear, persistence, pluck, and ultimate triumph. With humorous and poignant personal anecdotes, Jezer recalls being a student, too embarrassed to speak in class yet humiliated by his own chosen silence. Afraid to phone girls, he found ingenious ways to ask them out on dates. Apprehensive about raising children, he delighted in reading to his daughter. Told at a job interview that he was unemployable, he created his own career.In an endless effort to "cure” his stuttering, Jezer has tried many kinds of speech therapy and psychotherapy; he’s meditated, practiced oration, and done deep breathing; he’s even volunteered as a guinea pig to test an experimental drug for the National Institutes of Health. Supportive, though critical, of existing therapies, he is insistent that issues of identity, self-acceptance, and self-esteem are as vital as fluency techniques. Through the examples of new-found friends in the self-help movement for people who stutter, he learned to take responsibility for his speech. Although Jezer still stutters, he is no longer afraid to speak.However unique stuttering is as a disability, the daily embarrassments and deeper psychic indignities that stutterers face are commonplace. The defeats of giving into them and the triumphs of overcoming them are, as Jezer writes, the drama of life.Aristotle described the stutterer’s tongue as "too sluggish to keep pace with the imagination.” Quite the contrary; Marty Jezer may stutter, but he is seldom at a loss for words.
Poignant, funny, and eloquent, this multidimensional, holistic view of stuttering illustrates the author's lifelong struggle with his speech impediment and examines the current research on this widespread, but often overlooked, affliction. 256 pp. Online publicity. Targeted print features. 25,000 print.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Jezer's tale of his disability is often poignant but also inconsistent: although Jezer (author of biographies of Rachel Carson and Abbie Hoffman) claims not to be interested in writing a self-help book, the inclusion of tips like how to seek a therapist and sources for literature on stuttering have the opposite effect. The most frustrating thing about this volume though is Jezer's refusal to speculate on the source of his stutter. (In clinical tests, Jezer was judged to stutter 80% of the time he was speaking, while the average is about 10%) Instead he is happy to list what has not caused it-he scoffs at the idea that family environment might be involved. He also includes stories of remedies that did not vanquish his stuttering, such as a hair-raising tale of military-type training in which participants were scared out of stuttering. Jezer does reveal that he was not taken to a speech therapist until the age of eight, and even then the specialists who examined him assumed his problem to be a "developmental stutter" that he would outgrow. He tends to deflect deeper investigation of his own stutter either through humor, as when he recounts the trepidation he felt as his bar mitzvah approached, or by sharing the experiences of others, as when he describes how other grooms have handled the stuttering dilemma when saying their vows, but fails to describe his own wedding. Despite the title, this is more the genial autobiography of a man who happens to stutter, along with some heartwarming but familiar stories (growing up in a Jewish family in the Bronx, relocating to posh White Plains and joining the civil rights movement), than a careful examination of the phenomenon.Publishers Weekly -
Jezer's tale of his disability is often poignant but also inconsistent: although Jezer (author of biographies of Rachel Carson and Abbie Hoffman) claims not to be interested in writing a self-help book, the inclusion of tips like how to seek a therapist and sources for literature on stuttering have the opposite effect. The most frustrating thing about this volume though is Jezer's refusal to speculate on the source of his stutter. (In clinical tests, Jezer was judged to stutter 80% of the time he was speaking, while the average is about 10%) Instead he is happy to list what has not caused ithe scoffs at the idea that family environment might be involved. He also includes stories of remedies that did not vanquish his stuttering, such as a hair-raising tale of military-type training in which participants were scared out of stuttering. Jezer does reveal that he was not taken to a speech therapist until the age of eight, and even then the specialists who examined him assumed his problem to be a "developmental stutter" that he would outgrow. He tends to deflect deeper investigation of his own stutter either through humor, as when he recounts the trepidation he felt as his bar mitzvah approached, or by sharing the experiences of others, as when he describes how other grooms have handled the stuttering dilemma when saying their vows, but fails to describe his own wedding. Despite the title, this is more the genial autobiography of a man who happens to stutter, along with some heartwarming but familiar stories (growing up in a Jewish family in the Bronx, relocating to posh White Plains and joining the civil rights movement), than a careful examination of the phenomenon. (June)Booknews
Jezer, a biographer, tells the poignant, sometimes humorous, and ultimately triumphant story of his lifelong struggle with stuttering. He describes his experiences with various therapies, including speech therapy, meditation, and drug regimens, and discusses issues of identity, self-acceptance, and self-esteem. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.Kirkus Reviews
An engaging autobiography focusing on the author's lifelong struggle to achieve verbal and metaphysical fluency.Jezer (Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel, 1992, etc.), a '60s revolutionary, a supporter of environmentalism and feminism, and a chronicler of New Age self-fulfillment, focuses here on the mechanical and psychological dynamics of his chronic, often severe, stuttering. Even before getting involved in the author's childhood traumas, the reader must adjust to a plethora of technical terms involving the mechanics of speech, along with competing theories and therapies to contain disfluency. But that adjustment is easy because Jezer, when he's discussing relevant bits of genetics, neurology, or psychology, never loses sight of the universality of themes like human communication, vulnerability, and self-worth. In fact, there's a nice mix of the personal and the general throughout. The snapshots of Jezer's long struggle are vivid. Growing up "loquacious in thought" only, he requires "an act of God" to spare him from sounding like "Porky Pig . . . reciting a prayer in a Jewish temple" at his bar mitzvah. The pain of growing up with a handicap in the "it's all in your mind" '50s doesn't much moderate as the author, now grown, copes with employment and relationship problems. This highly communicative writer describes the stutterer's fear of telephones and tape recorders, and describes various speech therapists, their methods, philosophies, and relative successes. We also discover that the breathy speech of Marilyn Monroe and the oratorical exactness of Winston Churchill were the results of compensating for their stuttering. Jezer, the Bronx adman who takes on union busters and Klansmen, matures into a ponytailed Vermonter who finally achieves 60 percent fluency after overcoming laryngospasm and mastering continuity with syllable-stretching exercises.
A "Zen and the Art of Speech Therapy," deftly mingling the particulars of a humiliating struggle with the wider disruptions and challenges of life.