I picked this up from a community bookswap, not knowing who John Hockenberry was or what to expect. I was fascinated at the idea of stories from a disabled journalist in various war zones.

It's some of that. There is a lot more wheelchair than there is war zone. A lot of the book focusses on his early life, his accident, and how being disabled changed him personally. Fair enough - it wasn't exactly boring to read but you are turning the pages hoping the next chapter is about the Middle East rather than New York.

The war zone segments are around the First Gulf War and visits to Israel and Palestine. There's also one chapter on Somalia. Obviously current context makes the commentary fascinating for comparison. They appear at the start and then toward the very end of the book. Frustratingly for me, the most interesting chapter was Somalia - rather short and less elaborate than the other war zones.

Autobiographies always have that element of embellishment. I don't think there's many outright lies but there is a story that reads as a barely disguised cuckold fetish of him "accidentally" being trapped under his ex's bed and she's getting banged and how he starts rooting for her to get her rocks off - a story that's not entertaining enough to be a necessary inclusion.

Hockenberry writes a lot about the contradictions of being disabled, which makes my next criticism easy to shut down as "yeah it's meant to be that way - you know, because of contradiction?" that I'm not really convinced by. He spends some time criticising how people are obsessed with hearing about disabled people's sex lives and then proceeds to go into lurid detail about an episode where a friend of his travels across the country just to suck him off. I would later find the sexual harrassment allegations made against him to be unsurprising in context.

It's still interesting enough to pick up, and as an able-bodied person there's perspective in there that's fresh to me. I had just hoped to see more of that in the context of war zones.

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giovannigohome

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