Stuttering recovery: personal and empirical perspectives
Dale Williams, Laurence Erlbaum Associates

Review: Richard Lawson SLT, South Warwickshire NHS PCT

This book is intended for speech and language therapists, undergraduate and postgraduate students, people who stutter, significant others and anyone else with an interest in stuttering. They say you can't please all of the people all of the time but Professor Dale Williams has a good stab at it! This is an original and deceptively light-hearted book about an elusive and complex topic - recovery in stuttering.

Dale Williams is first and foremost a person with a stutter and secondly an associate professor of communication sciences and disorders at Florida Atlantic University. It does me the world of good as a speech and language therapist who stutters to know that there are people who stutter who can actually can get this far! And to a great extent this is the real strength of this book. It is both well referenced and academic, yet accessible, easy to read and strikes right at the heart of the stutterer's inner world. It is also written by someone who has obviously lived and is still living the life of a person with a stutter.

There are eight core chapters around key recovery issues eg 'what is recovery', 'how to read research', 'recovery and therapy', 'support groups', 'the stereotyping of people who stutter', 'listeners', 'friends, family and significant others' and interwoven between these are chapters where the ideas are played out in everyday contexts. In some way these personal perspectives are the real strength of this book because they make it clear that this is where the battle ground really is for people who want to work on their stutter. Stories that deal with self-talk, risk taking, listener reactions and managing family, friends and partners show that as people who stutter we not only need appropriate information but we also have to draw on our own honesty and courage. Towards the end of the book there is an A-Z of 'odds and ends' on anything you wanted to know about stuttering but were afraid to ask! Subjects as diverse as auditory feedback, botulinum toxin, dating, job interviews, personality, pharmacological agents, speaking on the job, and spontaneous recovery are all aired.

The author's overall view is that stuttering is a complex developmental disorder that is both pervasive and individual and because it is multifaceted in nature people who stutter are best served by an integrated approach to therapy. He goes on to say that the road to recovery is long and may not be easy to find but the journey is definitely worth the effort

If there is one negative thing that I would say about this book, it is that it is particularly written for American audience. Analogy and simile can be powerful literary weapons but a lot of the ones used in this book are wasted on a British audience who, if they are anything like me, are not overly familiar with the cultural life of Boca Raton, baseball, American football or the local TV programs. But I would still buy the book!

From the Autumn 2006 issue of 'Speaking Out', page 17

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