Twitch and Shout: A Touretter's Tale
Lowell Handler, Neal R. Swerdlow (Afterword), Elkhonon GoldbergBooks.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
Lowell Handler has Tourette's syndrome, a disorder characterized by exaggerated facial tics, sudden jerking movements of the body and limbs, and explosive public outbursts, usually in the form of expletives and racial epithets. Although he is a successful and acclaimed photojournalist, Handler has often seen himself as an outsider-a social outcast. With courage and candor, he recalls the difficulties he suffered growing up, the confusion he experienced when doctors misdiagnosed his bizarre behavior as a psychological aberration, and finally how, restless and despairing, he embarked on a quest for answers.In Twitch and Shout, Handler sets out, camera in hand, on a journey through less than savory parts of America. From a transvestite bar in Tampa to a flophouse in New Orleans to a community health center in New York, he meets a variety of people who, like himself, don't conform to the standards of conventional society. With a keen eye for detail and an acute sense of humor, this memoir perfectly captures the unique and unforgettable life of a Touretter. Lowell Handler is a photojournalist whose work has been published in, among others, Life, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, and the Sunday Times Magazine (London). He served as associate producer and narrator of the Emmy-nominated PBS documentary Twitch and Shout, an exploration of Tourette's syndrome. He lives in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he is on the faculty of the Department of Performing and Visual Arts at Dutchess Community College.Synopsis
With candor and humor, Handler (performing, visual arts and communications, Dutchess Community College) describes the people and places he saw, touched, loved, and hated as he set out to discover himself, armed with a camera, a keen sense of the real, and Tourette's Syndrome (TS). He describes other people with extraordinary bodies and attitudes along the way, including a major league basketball player who integrates TS barks and grunts into his game, twins who tic in unison, and a community of Mennonites in which TS is rampant. He explores the lives of people whose TS is accompanied by obsessive-compulsive disorders, the sensationalism of the media, and his own work on a prizewinning PBS documentary. He includes appendices with information about TS and resources. This is a reprint of the 1998 Dutton edition. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Publishers Weekly
In this straightforward chronicle of a life lived with Tourette's syndrome, first-time author Handler provides a memoir reminiscent of Temple Grandin's autistic-themed Thinking in Pictures. In addition to sharing a common link with Oliver Sacks as friend and counselor, Handler, like Grandin, asks for neither sympathy nor the label of victim. He would prefer that those he encounters in daily life look beyond the neurological disorder that erupts for him in involuntary twitches and grunts. In fact, Handler, by detailing his journey from isolation to treatment and understanding, shows how this rare disease can be a rich creative challenge. Although the author, a photojournalist, never spouts obscenities (uncontrolled profanity and other inappropriate speech afflict only about 15% of the 200,000 Americans who have Tourette's), he spent much of his life up to his early 20s twitching, shaking, jumping and otherwise alarming and upsetting himself, his family and the world outside. Handler offers wide coverage of his topic, from personal thoughts and anecdotes to discussion of pharmacological and political issues. In one memorable section, he takes a "road trip" with Sacks to visit a series of Tourette sufferers and, at one point, uses a bit of subterfuge to lose the good doctor so he can become better acquainted with a young lady. Among the most interesting passages are those profiles of Touretters in which we meet a surgeon, a professional basketball player and a symphony conductor. Equally fascinating are Handler's speculations on whether such historical notables as Samuel Johnson and Mozart suffered from Tourette's. For any interested in this curious disorder, this book is a must read. Photos. (May)
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
In this straightforward chronicle of a life lived with Tourette's syndrome, first-time author Handler provides a memoir reminiscent of Temple Grandin's autistic-themed Thinking in Pictures. In addition to sharing a common link with Oliver Sacks as friend and counselor, Handler, like Grandin, asks for neither sympathy nor the label of victim. He would prefer that those he encounters in daily life look beyond the neurological disorder that erupts for him in involuntary twitches and grunts. In fact, Handler, by detailing his journey from isolation to treatment and understanding, shows how this rare disease can be a rich creative challenge. Although the author, a photojournalist, never spouts obscenities (uncontrolled profanity and other inappropriate speech afflict only about 15% of the 200,000 Americans who have Tourette's), he spent much of his life up to his early 20s twitching, shaking, jumping and otherwise alarming and upsetting himself, his family and the world outside. Handler offers wide coverage of his topic, from personal thoughts and anecdotes to discussion of pharmacological and political issues. In one memorable section, he takes a "road trip" with Sacks to visit a series of Tourette sufferers and, at one point, uses a bit of subterfuge to lose the good doctor so he can become better acquainted with a young lady. Among the most interesting passages are those profiles of Touretters in which we meet a surgeon, a professional basketball player and a symphony conductor. Equally fascinating are Handler's speculations on whether such historical notables as Samuel Johnson and Mozart suffered from Tourette's. For any interested in this curious disorder, this book is a must read. Photos. (May)Library Journal
Characterized by involuntary vocalizations and movements, Tourette's Syndrome is a neurological disorder affecting between 100,000 and 200,000 Americans whose diagnosis can be missed if symptoms are interpreted as behavioral rather than medical in origin. The author, a photojournalist, describes his long and sometimes painful odyssey to discover the cause of the tics and jerks that plagued his childhood and adolescence. Along the way we meet family members, physicians such as neurologist Oliver Sacks, and fellow Touretters and learn about the drugs that help control some symptomsthough not without side effects of their own. The result is an "outsider's" life told from the inside, a personal memoir that profiles other Touretters from all walks of life. Handler is occasionally moving, but the tone is mostly matter-of-facthe's clearly come to terms with his conditionand this book will be most appreciated by fellow Touretters and their friends and family. A brief resources section is included. Recommended for consumer health collections. [Gwyn Hyman Rubio's Icy Sparks, a novel whose young heroine suffers from Tourette's Syndrome, will be published by Viking this August.Ed.]Anne C. Tomlin, Auburn Memorial Hosp. Lib., NYKirkus Reviews
Episodic, revealing memoirs of a young man with Tourette's Syndrome, a neurological disorder whose symptoms include uncontrollable tics and touching and odd vocalizations. Handler, a photojournalist and faculty member of the New School for Social Research, was born with the disorder but not diagnosed until he was a senior at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Relieved to know that his condition had a name and that he wasnþt alone, Handler eventually became active in the Touretteþs Syndrome Association, and it was through this organization that he found the subjects for a series of portraits of Touretters that Life magazine assigned him to produce. Although that series didnþt run in Life, the experience led him to contact neurologist Oliver Sacks to suggest a collaboration, and their joint photo essay on a Touretteþs family was published worldwide. In 1989, he began a five-year collaboration with film producer Laurel Chiten on a documentary about Tourette's Syndrome, also titled 'Twitch & Shout.'Thus the disorder has not only shaped Handler's life, but has been the focus of most of his life's work. His account of his travels around the country with Sacks as they sought out Touretters is a warts-and-all picture of the noted author, whose peculiar sleeping habits and other idiosyncracies Handler is not averse to recording. He is even more forthright about his own problems, however, describing his search for relief through various drugs (Haldol, pimozide, and for a long time a combination of Prozac and marijuana), his difficult relationship with his brother, the end of his unhappy marriage, in which his pot-smoking lifestyle played no small part, andhis brief affair with an especially troubled young woman. With its disjointed structure and photographs that seem to have been flipped carelessly, even haphazardly, onto the page, this memoir has all the energy and twitchiness of Touretteþs Syndrome, which is probably exactly what Handler intended.