Review by Booklist Review
Inspiring and empowering, this thoughtful, well-reported memoir covers the author's life, including his 2019 experience interviewing and writing about Joe Biden, the world's most famous stutterer. Hendrickson also weaves in highlights from dozens of others with stutters and sprinkles in such interesting tidbits as "people don't stutter when they sing." Like so many people who stutter, he was bullied, including by his own brother, because of his speech impediment. Ultimately, he forgives his sibling, who apologizes, and comes to realize stuttering can be a part of someone, not necessarily a weakness. Indeed, it conveys "two gifts" (one good and one bad): immense empathy (from being picked on and ostracized) and deep anger (from feeling frustrated and excluded). After the Atlantic publishes his Biden article, Hendrickson receives "personal, soulful, confessional" emails from fellow stutterers. This memoir reaches beyond Hendrickson's direct experience to advocate for "informative" rather than "apologetic" self-disclosure about an impediment and chronicle new developments in speech therapy. This is a potentially life-changing read for everyone, not only for people who are struggling with feeling different.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Hendrickson, a senior editor at the Atlantic, debuts with a powerful examination of his lifelong stutter. After his 2019 story about Joe Biden's stuttering went viral, Hendrickson decided to write about his own experiences. His stuttering, which began at a young age, was "viewed as something to be fixed, solved, and cured" and he underwent speech therapy lessons in elementary and middle school, which proved to be mostly futile. Throughout high school, Hendrickson attempted to mask his dysfluency by drinking and getting high: "Nearly every decision in my life has been shaped by my struggle to speak," he writes. Hendrickson captures the claustrophobic terror that a stutterer feels when he's unable to express the sound of a letter ("A bad block can make you feel like you're going to pass out"), and his interviews with researchers, therapists, fellow stutterers, and parents of children who stutter widen the narrative scope and compassionately uplift a stigmatized community. The author is a thoughtful reporter, and he delivers a visceral understanding of how he compartmentalized his shame. This memoir casts a necessary light on a disability that too often goes unseen. Agent: Amelia Atlas, ICM Partners. (Jan.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In Good for a Girl, two-time national champion Fleshman chronicles her life as a runner while arguing that the current sports industry is failing young female athletes and needs reform. In Warrior, Guerrero tracks her rise to chief investigative correspondent for Inside Edition despite harassment and pushback (35,000-copy first printing). In fall 2019, Atlantic senior editor Hendrickson limned Joe Biden's struggle to conquer stuttering (and his own) in a story that went viral and is expanded in Life on Delay, which highlights key issues stutterers face like bullying and depression and the support systems that mattered. ANew York Times best-selling author (see A Small Furry Prayer, my favorite) and human performance expert (he's executive director of the Flow Research Collective), Kotler explains how he pushed passed his limits to become a crack skier at age 53 inGnar Country (50,000-copy first printing). In Unraveling, the New York Times best-selling Orenstein (Cinderella Ate My Daughter) ends up touching on key social issues (from climate change to women's rights) as she explains how she coped with big life changes (a mother's death, a father's illness, a daughter's departure for college) by learning how to knit a sweater from scratch (shearing a sheep, spinning and dying yarn, and more) (75,000-copy first printing). In a series of weekly cartoon strips, celebrated French cartoonist Sattouf (The Arab of the Future, 4 vols.) recounted the life of his friend's daughter Esther from ages 10 to 12; Esther's Notebooks offers 156 of these strips, taken from the first three volumes of a series that appeared in Europe and has sold over 900,000 copies. Raped at age 11 by a neighborhood boy, Taylor was sent to live in an aunt's substandard household in rundown East St. Louis; The Love You Save recounts how she survived and thrived, finally becoming a Daily Beast editor at large (150,000-copy first printing).
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A senior editor at the Atlantic reflects on how his lifelong stutter has shaped his life and relationships. Hendrickson began having difficulties with his speech in kindergarten, and his teacher suggested that his parents have him evaluated by a speech pathologist. Soon he began to visit the dreaded "little room," the school therapist's office, while he and his parents hoped that his stutter would go away naturally, as some do, but "it got worse." Hendrickson poignantly chronicles his efforts to navigate adolescence and high school with a fear of speaking, discovering along the way that alcohol "greatly diminish[ed]" his stutter. He also writes about suffering from a depressive episode in his late teens. "Depression doesn't care if you acknowledge its existence," he writes. "It's quiet. It's patient….I've learned to manage it, but I still don't know if I'll fully return to that predepression point." In the midsection of the narrative, the author writes about his college years and the beginning of his career as a journalist, culminating in his 2019 interview with Joe Biden, "the most famous living stutterer." Hendrickson also describes the beginning of his relationship with his wife, Liz, who has dystonia, a neuromuscular disorder. As the author notes, the ways in which their bodies "betray" them became a point of commonality. Hendrickson's approach to his subject is both personal and investigative, as he recounts his interviews with his family, his former teachers and therapists, fellow stutterers, and doctors who study speech disorder. One of the most interesting interview subjects is Dr. Courtney Byrd, the director of the country's "preeminent stuttering research center," whose "controversial" take is that "a lot of the stigma that's related to stuttering begins in the office of the speech-language pathologist." The dramatic tension in the book is mainly derived from Hendrickson's fraught relationship with his brother, who bullied the author as a child, mocking his stutter mercilessly. This appealing and perceptive memoir takes an unsentimental look at life with a speech disorder. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
