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Summary: Hockenberry tells wheelchair life as it reallyexists.
Review: After 25 years of working with disabled students, I myself suddenly fought to stay alive and then spent nine months in rehabilitation. As a person who graduated from the same "rehab boot camp" as John Hockenberry, I identify with much of his book.After ffive years, I can walk, but am reading John's book very slowly. Life is great!
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Summary: Hilarious details of a handicapped person's life
Review: For those who enjoy true accounts of people's lives, here is your book. Moving Violations is an account of journalist John Hockenberry's life. The trick is he is paralized from the waist down and is in a wheelchair. The words on the pages are spiced up with hilarious details of his life. The part of his life he reveals to us about the first time John moves into a rehabilitation house tells us about mischief we all can relate to. I enjoyed reading about how John overcomes his difficulties. I would recommend this book to everyone who has compassion for others
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Summary: A great book -- Hockenberry's life reads like a movie script
Review: From the Turkish border, to rural Oregon, to the streets of NYC, Hockenberry's been around. Most of the time, in a wheelchair. This is the fascinating, at times hilarious, and often deeply moving story of one man's rise to success and knowledge of self and family. This is a guy who literally beat up a New York City taxi with his bare hands. The rest of the tales you'll have to read for yourself, and I hope you do. "Moving Violations" is an important book.
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Summary: Excellent -- funny, insightful,
Review: I read this book when it first came out, and found it funny and honest, gritty and enlightening. The author is an amazing talent -- a talent that seems to have no bounds.I have no personal experience with spinal cord injuries (knock wood), but came away from reading this book with a deep appreciation for the challenges facing people with them. The book made it abundantly clear that you simply cannot categorize people by their injuries or disabilities. Mr. Hockenberry is a great talent who happens to be a paralyzed from the waist down, not the other way around. I still miss him on NPR.
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Summary: Really had an imact
Review: I shared some of John Hockenberry's book with folks at an elderly home in Alphabet City, NYC. They enjoyed his writing as much as I did, and I'm sure many of them could relate to his experiences in a wheel chair. Hockenberry's words were inspirational to all of us.
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Summary: Really had an imact
Review: I shared some of John Hockenberry's book with folks at an elderly home in Alphabet City, NYC. They enjoyed his writing as much as I did, and I'm sure many of them could relate to his experiences in a wheel chair. Hockenberry's words were inspirational to all of us.
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Summary: Telling It Like It REALLY Is!
Review: I'm disabled. I detest almost all writing on disability. John Hockenberry is the only person I know who can write about it in a way that doesn't set my teeth on edge or have me flinging the book across the room by the end of the first chapter. I won't insult the author by saying that this book is "about" disability -- it's about one particular journalist -- but he sure knows how to tell it like it REALLY is!
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Summary: Moving Violations
Review: Journalist Johh Hockenberry's sitrring account of surmounting hearty obstacles - both physical and emotional - is a monument to human resilience. His exceptional prose reflects a witty, intelligent and perceptive spirit. He takes on crip sex, people's perceptions of crip challenges, and society's mental blocks toward the disabled. For example, many expect a paraplegic to entertain suicidal thoughts. "I never once contemplated suicide. Suicide is something you argue yourself out of, not into," he says. As a paraplegic, I am moved by this autobiography. As a human being, I appreciate it even more.
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Summary: A MUST READ BOOK for anyone with a human body
Review: Like it or not, everyone who lives long enough is sooner or later going to become disabled. Read about it here and now from a brilliant writer and extraordinary person. Mr. Hockenberry covers every aspect of disability, from sensitive descriptions of his feelings about his body, to the horrendous insensitivity with which many so-called able-bodied folk react to him, to vital discussions about the social injustices perpetrated on disabled people at every turn. All this and more is woven into a tale about the amazing world of a courageous, iconoclastic, humorous, and outrageous individual who lives a very exciting life. Thanks, John, for one terrific read, with a hundred or more important messages for all of us.
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Summary: You keepon learning, after the last page.
Review: Reflection on "Moving Violations" Ellie Widmer Moving Violations, the memoir of John Hockenberry-- is a very moving story. It is frank and honest, inspiring and also surprisingly entertaining. Mr. Hockenberry uses a style that works well--he starts at the end, goes back to the beginning, and blends the story very nicely. He is a seasoned reporter; he sure knows how to keep his audience's attention! But it is not only his story that intrigues me. It is a pattern of human behavior that I have noticed before, in real life relationships as well as in autobiographies. At some juncture in the lives of a great number of people, the courage, the desire, maybe even the need for honesty appears and manifests itself in a variety of ways. After major life events, be they catastrophes or spiritual enlightenment-or any number of other life changing experiences-to relate to readers or listeners the formerly hidden or "avoided " side of one's life, the mistakes if you will, the things one would ordinarily suppress is often a significant aspect of writings and speeches. In biographies in which family secrets, for instance, are aired in public, a reader can wonder if the subject is angry or embarrassed, or even if all the facts are accurate. But in biography, when a public figure reveals the sins of his or her youth, the transgressions against the formal law or the social norms, it is usually after a significant event in that person's life has occurred. Sometimes it may be when the writer is approaching or has reached old age; but more often it is something that literally wakes one up to a new sense of priorities, a new value system, a need to be as open honest with oneself, and consequently with everyone else. Self-disclosure can be freeing, healing and energizing. But my interest in this whole issue is not just that it seems to happen, but rather why does it happen? Is it even a deliberate attempt at openness, or is it a natural instinct after a significant life experience? Is it a debt one owes to oneself to represent one's life as it really was, with the good the bad and the in between, rather that use the selective memory that sheds only positive light on the teller? Does traumatic or life jolting experience remind us so much of our finite condition, that we can no longer abide superficiality? Do we then care more about getting in touch with our true selves than what others may think of us? But most of all, is this a conscious thing? I think it may not be, but rather this behavior may be part of a growth process--a very positive one-- that many but not all people achieve in their lifetime. Could these phenomena be considered a sort of spiritual evolution in the context of a single life span? I would think there have been studies about this sort of thing. If so, I would like to know about them. I thank Mr. Hocenberry for his gift to all readers who pick up this book; it is a treasure.
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