Stuttering: A Life Bound Up in Words [Paperback]

Marty Jezer (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0972534504 | ISBN-13: 978-0972534505 | Publication Date: October 30, 2008

“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.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Marty Jezer spent much of his life dreading such ordinary tasks as making phone calls, asking directions, or ordering food, because he stutters. His moving and motivating memoir is an account of Jezer's attempts to deal with a speech disfluency that he defines as not a mere motor disorder, but, rather, a genetically based, organic disposition affecting the entire person. Jezer discusses the causes, cures, and prevention of disfluency, stresses that stuttering is never anyone's fault, and advises that advances made during treatments often do not transfer to the real world. He himself tried medications, deep breathing, sensory deprivation, speech classes, therapy, and psychoanalysis until discovering an appliance called an Edinburgh masker that generates white noise to mask the sound of the stutterer's own voice. Jezer's speech improved so much that he discovered a newfound talkativeness, abandoned his frustrations, and became his own hero--all in the face of a dysfunction for which the only absolute cure is silence. A valuable addition to any general collection. Patricia Hassler --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From 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. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 266 pages
• Publisher: Small Pond Pr (October 30, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0972534504
• ISBN-13: 978-0972534505
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,155,528 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent description of one man's struggle with stuttering., April 18, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Stuttering: A Life Bound Up In Words (Hardcover)

Book Review
Lou Heite
[e-mail]

STUTTERING: A Life Bound Up in Words
Marty Jezer
New York: Basic Books, A Division of Harper-Collins Publishers, 1997

Marty Jezer's much-awaited book is on the brink of publication, if it isn't already on the stands. Marty, of course, is known throughout the stuttering community for his clear, intelligent commentary and searching questions on several discussion lists. Marty is a commited pacifist whose conciliatory tone consistently rises above flame battles which remind this writer of scenes from Star Wars. In his book he has applied his great good humor to the story of his lifelong battle with his severe stutter, and has come out the winner.

From a vantage point of middle-aged mellowness, Marty has taken a clear-eyed look at what it means to be a person who stutters and what impact his speech impediment has had on his life. He is neither vindictive nor maudlin. He makes no attempt to hide his avoidances, his denial, or his embarrassment under a cloak of heroism, and yet the real strength of his honesty shows in his unwillingness to blame any individuals or much of society for the difficulties he has experienced, difficulties which are familiar to us all. Marty is no whiner.

The book begins and ends with a description of Marty's participation in an experiment involving a drug that some hoped would alleviate stuttering. For those who have dreamed of a "fluency pill" -- a regular list topic -- these two chapters alone are worth the price of the book. But there is more, much more, to be learned in retracing Marty's path through the minefield of life with a stutter.

Marty's story underscores the oft-made assertion that the only thing that differentiates those who stutter from the general population is the fact that they stutter. Marty's loving, if somewhat competitive, family, his school, his neighborhood, his college, and his original career goals are a model of American life in the 1950's and 1960's. I would like to have seen a closer look at the effects of Marty's stuttering on the people around him, but the young Marty was a remarkably normal kid and by his own confession didn't think about that any more than he absolutely had to.

There are some wildly funny passages in the book, ones which I think anyone can identify with, whether stutterer or not. The hilarity and pathos of the chapter "An Errant Elbow or an Act of God" is as gripping in its second and third readings as it was when it first appeared in draft on The Stuttering Homepage. And there is a description of a restaurant dinner with his family that made this reader laugh out loud remembering the same kind of conversation around my own parents' table, ten adults and ten monologues only tenuously connected by a most absurd stream-of-consciousness association.

And yet, for all the good humor and, yes, love of life in this book, Marty delineates well the kinds of wrenching doubts and wandering detours that plague the fumbletongued. He holds up a lot of mirrors to others of us who have had to wrestle with the same demon - even though the demon might be smaller and more tractable in its form. It was the little things that grabbed me particularly: Marty's desire to be a funny person, his recitations alone before the mirror and in the shower, a preference in conversation to agree or to summarize rather than to bring up or change topics. The war with the telephone. The desire, indeed, a near compulsion, to write - and the freedom and joy of the written page where words fasten themselves in their ordered rows and meaning is divorced from delivery.

Marty came of age at a time of great turmoil in American society. In the eyes of at least some of us, he took a hero's stand against great injustices and terrible lies. The entire community should be proud that there were stutterers at the vanguard of the Antiwar and Civil Rights movements. Not only Marty, but his friend Paul Johnson, also a person who stutters, were instrumental in the formation of the arguments in the early years of the Protest movement. It was Johnson who introduced Marty to the activist's life and who helped him find his real voice as a journalist and formulator of policy. Their actions at that time have had a lasting effect on the shape of American society.

Marty is sure, and I will second his assertion, that the little and big prejudices which he faced as a stutterer made him especially sensitive to the big and bigger prejudices which spawned the Civil Rights movement. And from there it was only a short step to seeking a fuller liberation of all society, in the Free Speech and the Anti-War movements. That Marty could turn his intensely personal experience of prejudice as a stutterer to society's greater good should stand as a reminder to all of us that no matter how bitterly we perceive our own oppression, there is great freedom to be gained in helping others to achieve their liberation.

I could easily see _Stuttering: A Life Bound Up in Words_ as a topic of organized discussion in self-help and group therapy sessions. Marty touches on almost the whole range of emotion which is likely to both inspire and trouble the person who stutters. He also delineates the process of growth, from denial through depression to something resembling integration. He makes it clear that one can honestly accept the fact of stuttering without having to accept the baggage that attaches to the label "stutterer."

I would especially recommend this book to parents and "significant others" of people who stutter. Marty's candid and unsentimental descriptions of the way his impediment has influenced and been influenced by his feelings, his aspirations, and his dreams should open passages to understanding for those who feel the effect of their loved one's impediment almost as directly as the stutterer him- or herself. This book has the potential to provide talking points for people who are inhibited by shyness and the natural reluctance to bring up a subject that may be painful to someone they are close to.

As a final note, it is interesting to compare _Stuttering: A Life Bound Up in Words_ with Wendell Johnson's little autobiography, _Because I Stutter_, which was made available online within this past week. They make a very interesting back-to-back read, for though about seventy years stands between the two books, the stories are remarkably similar. The basic message is that stuttering, though a dreadful inconvenience and even a torment, is not necessarily a permanent roadblock to a productive, fulfilling, interesting, and ultimately happy life.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF A PERSON WHO STUTTERS, February 20, 2001

By 

DIANE (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stuttering: A Life Bound Up In Words (Hardcover)

MR. JEZER'S GIVES PARENTS INSIGHT ON THEIR CHILDS DISABILITY. AS A PARENT OF A SEVERE STUTTER WE ARE ALWAYS LOOKING FOR ANSWERS OR SOLUTIONS TO THE OUR SON'S SPEECH DIFFICULTIES. CHILDREN HAVE DIFFICULTY ARTICULATING THEIR FRUSTRATIONS, EMOTIONS, AND INNER CONFLICTS. MR. JEZER HELPED ME UNDERSTAND MY SONS DAILY STRUGGLES JUST ALTTLE CLEARER. I WISH I WOULD HAVE READ THIS SOONER, I MAY HAVE APPROACHED THINGS DIFFERENTLY. THANK YOU FOR SHARING YOUR STORY WITH US.