Amazon.com Review
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
On December 8, 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby's life was forever altered when a part of his body he'd never heard
of--his brain stem--was rendered inactive. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, his exquisitely painful memoir, is neither
a triumphant account of recovery nor a journey into the abyss of self- pity. Instead, it is a tender testament to the
power of language and love. At 43, Bauby was defined by success, wit, and charisma. But in the course of a few
bewildering minutes, the editor in chief of French Elle became a victim of the rare locked-in syndrome. The only way
he could express his frustration, however, was by blinking his left eye. The rest of his body could no longer
respond. Bauby was determined to escape the paralysis of his diving bell and free the butterflies of his imagination.
And with the help of ESA, "a hit parade in which each letter is placed according to the frequency of its use in the
French language," Bauby did so. Visitors, and eventually his editor, would read each letter aloud and he would blink
at the right one. Slowly--painstakingly--words, sentences, paragraphs, and even this graceful book emerged. Bauby
relays the horrors and small graces of his struggle, which range from awakening one day to discover his right eye
being sewn shut to realizing the significance of Father's Day, a holiday previously absent from his family's
"emotional calendar": "Today we spent the whole of the symbolic day together, affirming that even a rough sketch,
a shadow, a tiny fragment of a dad is still a dad." The author makes it clear that being locked in doesn't kick open
the doors of perception, but The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is nonetheless a celebration of life. Jean
Dominique-Bauby died of a heart attack on March 9, 1997, two days after his book was published in France.