Stuttering: My Life Bound Up in Words

Jezer's tale of his disability is often poignant but also inconsistent: although Jezer (author of biographies of Rachel Carson and Abbie Hoffman) claims not to be interested in writing a self-help book, the inclusion of tips like how to seek a therapist and sources for literature on stuttering have the opposite effect. The most frustrating thing about this volume though is Jezer's refusal to speculate on the source of his stutter. (In clinical tests, Jezer was judged to stutter 80% of the time he was speaking, while the average is about 10%) Instead he is happy to list what has not caused it--he scoffs at the idea that family environment might be involved. He also includes stories of remedies that did not vanquish his stuttering, such as a hair-raising tale of military-type training in which participants were scared out of stuttering. Jezer does reveal that he was not taken to a speech therapist until the age of eight, and even then the specialists who examined him assumed his problem to be a ""developmental stutter"" that he would outgrow. He tends to deflect deeper investigation of his own stutter either through humor, as when he recounts the trepidation he felt as his bar mitzvah approached, or by sharing the experiences of others, as when he describes how other grooms have handled the stuttering dilemma when saying their vows, but fails to describe his own wedding. Despite the title, this is more the genial autobiography of a man who happens to stutter, along with some heartwarming but familiar stories (growing up in a Jewish family in the Bronx, relocating to posh White Plains and joining the civil rights movement), than a careful examination of the phenomenon. (June)