Stuttering: A Life Bound Up In Words

by Marty Jezer
(Basic Books, 1997)

Reviews

"If you stutter, read it."
--NY TIMES SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW, August 17, 1997. Editor's choice, August 24, 1997, Aug 31, 1997, Holiday Books, December 7, 1997

"Jezer's autobiography of his stutter is a hilarious, honest, expedition to the hard of a paradoxical disability."
--UTNE REVIEW Selection of Good Reads, Sept-Oct 1997

"This is a wonderful autobiography, written with courage, warmth, and wit, about a personal problem with stuttering. It gives the reader the latest news about stuttering treatment and research, from the perspective of someone who has been a client in many therapies and a subject in several studies. At its heart is a powerful story of growing up, shedding illusions, and coping with life. I think that everyone who stutters and every speech-language pathologist who works with stutterers should read it. In fact, so should anyone interested in the human condition."
--BARRY GUITAR, PH.D, CCC-SLP, Professor, University of Vermont

"Totally absorbing. Jezer has accomplished an admirable interweaving of his experiences and introspections as a stutterer with a great deal of accurate information about stuttering and its treatment. The book should be of very considerable value to stutterers and their parents. For clinicians and students of speech pathology, the book offers a compelling glimpse of the inner life of a stutterer."
--OLIVER BLOODSTEIN, Speech and Hearing Center, Brooklyn College

"Marty Jezer had me totally captivated from page one. He's an absolutely engaging story teller, and he looks at chronic stuttering from so many different perspectives that you cannot help but come away with an intuitive understanding of the multitude of ways the individual is affected. I consider STUTTERING: A LIFE BOUND UP IN WORDS a valuable resource for anyone who needs to know more about this troubling disorder."
--JOHN C. HARRISON, Program Director, National Stuttering Project Co-editor of Letting Go, Newsletter of the NSP Author, How To Conquer Your Fears of Speaking Before People: A Comprehensive Program Designed for People Who Stutter

"This book should be of interest to anyone who wants to know more about stuttering. I found it quite good reading."
--JANE FRASER, Director, Stuttering Foundation of America

"Marty Jezer has written a book about stuttering which should be required reading for anyone who offers or plans to offer professional help for people who stutter. With the current behavioral focus on how to achieve and maintain fluency, the individual doing the stuttering can all but disappear. This book is a powerful antidote to that view. It is a vivid picture of the world of stuttering as seen from the inside looking out."
--PROFESSOR WILLIAM PERKINS, Professor Emeritus, formerly Director of the Stuttering Center at the University of Southern California

"Fascinating. . . . Jezer combines his considerable literary skills as a writer with his history as someone who has lived with an intensely personal, severe, and chronic stuttering problem. He is forthright in explaining those things which have been helpful to him--as well as those things which have not. This is more than a book about stuttering. It is also a book about empathy, understanding, advocacy, and change."
--STEPHEN B. HOOD, PH.D., director, Speech and Hearing Center, University of South Alabama

"Jezer...is a gifted writer and moves with beguiling skill between general theory and the lessons of personal experience.... Anyone who stutters, or who is interested in stuttering, will benefit from reading this book. They will come away from it with admiration for the courage and determination of the author, and (if they happen to be fluent) with a wiser and more sympathetic appreciation of those less fortunate than themselves."
--BENSON BOBRICK, author of Knotted Tongues: Stuttering in History and the Quest for a Cure.