Twitch and Shout: A Touretter's Tale Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Twitch and Shout: A Touretter's Tale Book

Tourette's syndrome is a neurological disorder characterized by tics, physical jerks, and random shouts and noises that can include profanity and racial epithets. It's become relatively well known through the writings of neurologist Oliver Sacks (whose bestselling book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat includes several case studies of Touretters--as he dubbed them), and through the 1995 documentary Twitch and Shout, a film coauthored by Lowell Handler and Laurel Chiten, both of whom have the disorder. Now Handler has written a book with the same name, an attempt to chronicle the disease from the inside, to explore the strange life and symptoms of a person who has discovered, as he puts it, that "the mind has a mind of its own." His personal odyssey includes many digressions into how the disorder has shaped the course of his relationships with his family, his career as a photojournalist, and his sense of purpose and belonging in society. He meets with other Touretters, including a professional basketball player, a medical doctor, and, in one of the book's most surreal episodes, an ex-military man who had served in a nuclear missile silo in charge of the launch keys. But while there is much honesty about the emotional impact of the disorder on an individual's life, Handler (who admits that he suffers from lifelong dyslexia) provides a severely fragmented narrative, jumping from episode to episode with little sense of closure or lessons learned. What's more, he's unable to give much insight into how it feels to have the disorder, or how the mind of someone with Tourette's differs from a nonsufferer. Still, some of his thoughts are intriguing (he posits, for example, that the great 18th-century author Samuel Johnson may have been a Touretter) and individual episodes ring with the resonance of hard-won truth. --John LongenbaughRead More

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  • Product Description

    "Wonderful, compassionate, funny, instructive, inspiring and flat-out brilliant," said The New York Daily News about the award-winning 1995 documentary film, "Twitch and Shout." Narrator, associate producer, and photographer for that project, Lowell Handler has lived with Tourette's Syndrome his entire life. The neurological disorder causes sudden jerking movements and tics, as well as an uncontrollable propensity to curse. Despite this, people with Tourette's work as surgeons, airline pilots, actors, and professional athletes. In this tremendously appealing book, Handler reveals how the disorder has affected him and shaped his world, as well as providing insights into the symptoms of Tourette's, how it was discovered, and how people with the syndrome are regarded by others. As the tone of the title suggests, Twitch and Shout is no plea for pity, but a wry and ambitious effort to reclaim and humanize a disorder that can keep others at a distance.

    * Confirmed "Dateline" appearance at the time of publication.
    * The first personal account of Tourette's.
    * Handler has already been the subject of features in The New Yorker, The New York Times, USA Today, and on NPR's "Fresh Air."
    * Nearly 200,000 Americans have Tourette's .
    * Includes Handler's remarkable photos of people with Tourette's.

  • 0525942165
  • 9780525942160
  • Lowell Handler
  • 1 June 1998
  • E P Dutton & Co Inc
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 256
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