Research Catalog

Stuttering : a life bound up in words

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	RC424 .J49 1997	Off-site

Description

xx, 266 pages; 22 cm

Summary

"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, silence, and the pleasures and pitfalls of everyday communication.
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.

Subject

Stuttering

Note

ISBN

0465081274 :

LCCN

96052955

OCLC

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries