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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. Once thought to be a sign of possession, this neurological disorder causes sudden jerking movements and tics, as well as an uncontrollable propensity to curse.
In this revealing memoir Handler tells of how Tourette's has shaped his life and provides insight into the strange symptoms that are often debilitating and alienating. As the title suggests, Twitch and Shout is no plea for pity; it is a heartfelt and often humorous effort to reclaim and humanize a disorder that can keep others at a distance.
* An excellent resource for students of psychology
"Touching...an insightful account of the pain and triumph that one person experienced making peace with the limitations of his existence." --The New York Times Book Review
"A mind-bending account of a mind-boggling affliction" --Entertainment Weekly
"Lowell Handler writes with enormous honesty, humor and gusto. This is a most engaging inside account of a life, a rich and creative life, with Tourette's." --Oliver Sacks
"Very droll...an ever so honest memoir of life with Tourette's Syndrome." --Elle
Amazon.com Review
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 Longenbaugh
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