Customer Reviews

One-Handed in a Two-Handed World: Your Personal Guide to Managing Single-Handedly

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I am a thirteen year old middle school student. I got this book because my teacher heard the author interviewed on public radio and thought I would like it. It is a good book because it gave me lots of tips about operating in the world with one hand which I have been doing since I had a stoke in second grade. The tips on painting my nails and doing my hair were great. Tommye Mayer gave some good ideas on playing tennis, too. But I like to play basketball, and I wish she had given me some tips on guiding the ball when you shoot.This book was written by someone who really knows what my life is like. If I could add a chapter to this book it would be called " Life in a Teenager's World" and include ideas about making friends and dating. You should get this book if you are one-handed because it helped me and I bet it would help you, too.

Several of our strokesurvivor members/and caregivers have read this book and reviewed it. Our Strokesurvivors International website books page is http://strokesurvivors.homepage.com/BooksP/index.htm Our RN/Social worker (and a Stroker) wrote about this book: "I have read Living OneHanded in a Two handed World by Tommye Mayer several times and consider it to be my bible.The range of topics covered in this book is phenomenal! Until I found this book, the simple act of dressing myself in the morning became a battle with overwhelming frustration because I couldn't get my clothes on correctly. Simple tips in this book allowed me to master dressing myself with ease. And probably kept me from surrendering to depression by just staying in bed all day. I consider it a Must read for anyone with the challenge of having only one functional hand."

This book is a practical guide for managing one-handed. It's very concreteness is a refreshing antidote to the usual experiential approach and, besides, its helpful. While one could figure many things out on one's own, it is a good starting point that by its nature encourages the attitude that there are ways to do things. Also it is a guide to the kinds of gadgets that can be useful, especially for those whose one-handedness is more than a temporary inconvenience--knives, cutting boards, etc. My main quibble is with those parts that instruct in how-to,e.g., tie shoelaces. Like the usual how-to instructions for putting barbecues together, wiring stereo, systems, etc., they are hard to follow. The verbal instructions are accompanied by blurry photographs. A series of line drawings would have been better..I gave up in frustration and figured out my own method.

Bought this for older person (85) who had carpel tunnel operation on their wrists.
It is a managable size; the pages turn and stay open easily with the ring binding.
Feedback from the receiver suggests their are some interesting ideas in there and
some of the entries are hard to follow by words alone. Would benefit from illustrations or better still a demonstration video. A lot seemed to be stating the obvious but that's good for someone coming to terms with their situation. There doesn't seem to be a host of products out there in this area.
In summary, I would get it as a beginners overview and practical account of how one person has learnt to deal with their situation and keep looking for more visual products.

When confronted with having only one arm useful and very frustrated, I found this book to be THE ANSWER. The author tells you many ways to navigate everyday things with only one hand - all those things you never gave a thought until you did not have two hands to work with. Buy this book for yourself or a friend and pass it along if you are lucky enough to be only temporarily one handed. This is the personal coach/mentor you have been looking for as you cope with being one-handed!

Not recommended.This book contains too much out of date information.There are better sites on the internet. Look at Yoocan toocan and books on brain plasticity.

Very helpful--my 33 year old son had a stroke and this guide gave him more information how to do things with one hand. Also, shared this with his Occupational Therapist and she was very impressed.

First of all, I should acknowledge that I may not be the target demographic for this book. I have a paralyzed left arm from a brachial plexus injury at birth, so I've been one-handed my entire life; the book, on the other hand, seems oriented toward someone who has suffered an injury after previously having had the full use of both hands. Consequently, many of the tips in the book seemed obvious to me, as I've been doing those things (e.g., dressing myself one-handed) longer than I can remember.

However, even for a recent amputee/stroke victim/etc., I question the value of much of what is in this book. The photographs are tiny and hard to make out, the instructions for complex actions are sometimes hard to follow, and the editing is poor (missing words, garbled sentences, transposing left & right in instructions). And many of the things seem ridiculous to even include in a book like this. An entire page (half of p. 91 and half of p. 92) is devoted to eating ice cream from a bowl with a spoon... Seriously. Is this really something that mentally competent people can't manage without detailed instructions? I haven't seen a lot of people above the toddler stage having to use two hands to hold a spoon. Along the same lines, there are multiple pages in the 'Technology' section (p. 187) discussing computer software and hardware, a lot of which has almost nothing to do with one-handedness.

One 'gadget' recommended is a modified cutting board for food preparation. It consists of a regular cutting board with a couple of 3-inch steel nails sticking straight up out of it to stabilize food. While cutting food items is definitely something that the one-handed person will have to take some special effort with, having huge nails protruding from the board doesn't seem like a very safe solution to me.

I hoped there would be more practical discussion or anecdotes regarding unusual or awkward situations that one-handed people may encounter; I can only remember a couple that came up in the book: accepting an award (the handshake-for-photos thing), and doing first aid on your good hand.

In summary, there *may* be some useful tips in here for someone who just recently lost the use of a hand, but I can't recommend this book. There are bound to be better resources out there.

If you want to help someone who is dealing with the loss of a hand, this is the book. Even the book itself was made for a one handed person to read (which, surprisingly, was not thought through in other books I found) - the cover opens up and lays flat because of it's binder.

This book has been well received at the International Children's Amputee Network Web site....

There is a nice set of photos of how to tie shoes there, and discussion of this book. I'm glad this book is available.