Monday, September 17, 2012

Stuttering: Inspiring Stories and Professional Wisdom

Check out Peter Reitzes' book which collects stories and wisdom from people who stutter and professionals. I asked him to send me a summary of what his book is about. Attentive readers will note the ambitious "Publication No. 1." on the title page. I didn't have time to read through the book, but it seems to be cast in the mindset of its editor: providing others the opportunity to talking about their experiences and throwing out ideas while avoiding more definite scientific or generalizing statements that I could take apart! ;-)

 Here is the summary:
The book is titled Stuttering: Inspiring Stories and Professional Wisdom.  
It contains 25 chapters written by people who stutter, leading professionals and the spouse of a person who stutters. All chapters were donated to StutterTalk to help raise money for the free podcast. The book is available in paperback at Amazon for $12.99 and as an ebook and download at Kindle, iTunes and Smashwords for $5.99. Barnes & Noble online will carry the book within a few weeks. I
am happy to see that within a few weeks of publication, the StutterTalk book is already the first book listed on iTunes. 
The link above has a good, short summary of the book. 24 of the chapters appear in the StutterTalk book for the first time anywhere. One chapter, by David Mitchell, is a reprint and is one that I really wanted in the book. I invited every author to submit a chapter on a specific topic. My brother, David Reitzes, and I edited the book. We had editing help from Nan Bernstein Ratner, Walter H. Manning, Bob Quesal, Scott Yaruss and others. 
While I love all the chapters, what I think sets the book apart from other books are some of the "under reported" topics. There are chapters on substance abuse and stuttering, issues in the LGBT community and stuttering, discrimination, several chapters on passing as fluent, etc.
I asked each author to write his or her chapter with adults who stutter as the main audience in mind and I think the book has benefited from this approach.

2 comments:

Ora said...

Amazon allows reading a sample of the book for free, either onscreen or on your Kindle device or Kindle app.

See http://www.amazon.com/Stuttering-Inspiring-Stories-Professional-Wisdom/dp/0615689523/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1348072781&sr=8-2&keywords=peter+reitzes

Logan said...

I would have loved to submit a chapter to this book. I don't have any answers or cure alls, which is what any readers will truly desire, but as a stutterer I think I could fill quite a few niches as far as the topic of the book goes (especially the under reported categories).