Coping with Stammering
by Dr Trudy Stewart and Jackie Turnbull,
specialist speech and language therapists.

This is one of the best introductory books about stammering I have read. It does not pretend to be a technical book. It is aimed at stammerers themselves and their relatives and friends. It deals well with the many subtle distinctions of feeling familiar to all stammerers and will be particularly useful to stammerers who find it hard to accept that a non-stammerer can understand how they really feel.

The book is quite frank in admitting that we do not know why people stammer. Rightly it does not point to any single cause or cure. Instead, it gives a very fair summary of the present state of knowledge about the causes of stammering, and of the therapies for dealing with it, so fair indeed, that it is hard to guess what the authors' true opinions are. These sections are so well done that many readers will want to read further, and an appendix contains a useful guide to further reading, including a short list of scientific journals.

The core of the book is a series of chapters suggesting how stammerers can improve their speech and, just as importantly, deal with situations where it is not improving or improving only very slowly. Here there are many pertinent ideas where the authors' empathy for the feelings of stammerers is invaluable. Embedded in the text and providing an astringent contrast to it, are most useful comments by stammerers of their experiences, usually optimistic in tone but not unrealistically so. Perhaps an outlet of unrelieved despair here might have been a good idea, if only for the sake of realism.

The book's greatest strength is that it looks at stammerers as a whole. The authors see very clearly that a stammerer's embarrassment about his or her stammer is often as powerful a bar to improvement as the stammer itself, and they suggest many ways of dealing with this. In fact their determination to think of stammering as just one aspect of someone's personality means that they almost never use the word "stammerer", a good idea which only lack of time prevented me from copying.

Review by John Ford, Winter 1997/98 issue of Speaking Out

to library entry to shop entry to list of reviewse