John Hockenberry

On a continuum of woe is me to make lemonade, John Hockenberry is far on the lemonade end. A math major at the University of Chicago when a car accident (the driver fell asleep and was killed) paralyzed him from the chest down, he segued into a “crip job” training developmentally disabled adults (taking clients for jaunts to the beach in an orange pickup truck with a repurposed bicycle rack for the wheelchair), music major (inventing a mouth device to press the piano pedal before show more deciding the hands-only harpsichord was not an admission of defeat), newscaster for a local public radio station (on the radio, nobody knows you’re a paraplegic), foreign correspondent in such wheelchair-accessible locations as Iraq and Somalia (turns out pretty well when people treat a wheelchair as one of life’s many nuisances and simply carry it up the stairs; more difficult to see an opera in New York with a balcony ticket). His attitude is pragmatic and irreverent with a dose of overcompensation (“your mother and I think you use the wheelchair as a crutch” says his father), and then... pent-up anger bursts forth when a taxi driver tries to avoid him and refuses to put the wheelchair in the trunk, and empathy exudes in reflections about a grandfather who lost an arm in an electrocution accident and an uncle mentally and physically damaged by phenylketonuria.

I don’t even know why I have this book, and I read it somewhat at random, so it was a pleasant (if that’s quite the right word) surprise. show less

Most of the Christian landmarks [in the Middle East] are dormant shrines to old arguments between popes and Orthodox patriarchs and caliphs having little to do with the time or place Jesus grew up and died. There are a handful of historically dubious places for Christian pilgrims. The dingy grottoes, tombs, and street corners where Jesus was thrown, dragged, bled, drank some vinegar, was condemned and then nailed to a post one spring day 2,000 years ago are mobbed with tourists and souvenir show more salesmen today.

"The Church of the Holy Sepulcher itself is a sprawling trophy from the Byzantine Empire administered grumpily by representatives of the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Seventeen centuries ago they argued whether Christ had three aspects or just one, whether he was rich or poor, whether he needed a spokesman or just a book. Today the same churches argue over who will fix the leaky roof over the place where an angel allegedly told the first Christians, 'Seek ye not the living among the dead.' It was the last time that advice was heeded.

"Among the millions of pilgrims in Jerusalem, it was the Christians who came looking for God as if to confirm a juicy rumor they had heard. Christians have been trolling and casting for God since before the crucifixion. Just as Jesus found some sympathetic anglers right off the bat and convinced them to join the coming Christian hordes, Christians approach the question of finding God with the gusto of a fisherman working a trout stream. Each denomination has its own strategy for hooking the big one. Catholics go for the shiny lures with lots of ugly dangling hooks. Protestants like live bait." (From Moving Violations) show less

Hockenberry begins the book with the story of going out among refugee Kurds during the first Iraq war, unable to take his wheelchair because of the terrain. So he’s riding a donkey, except for when he falls off and is nearly left to die in the mud, and the people around him variously save his life; answer his questions; and wonder what an American is doing there, why America isn’t helping them, and why another man who can’t walk has joined them when they have troubles enough of their show more own. From the start, the book is about privilege, specifically Hockenberry’s privilege as a white American man and his lack of privilege as a paraplegic, and how those intersect.

While Hockenberry mostly refuses to analogize, he does say that the people who’ve treated him as a person rather than as a problem have usually been outside America or, in the US, African-American; at one point, he suggests that the default American (white male) position is to assume that things are going to work—work for him, work in his favor, just operate--and that in the countries where he’s been a foreign correspondent, that’s often not an assumption people can afford, just as it’s not for him even when he’s in the US. Hockenberry’s a jerk—one story about him hiding under an ex-girlfriend’s bed makes that supremely clear—but he’s also a good reporter, and I found the book really engaging reading. There’s a great bit, for example, about the relationship between disability, insurance, and cars, and the American insistence on getting people into cars no matter the cost. The stories are roughly half about America and half about other countries: Israel, Iraq, Somalia, Iran. Highly recommended. show less

Moving Violations is the memoir of a man who is living life on 11 despite an auto accident he was involved in at age 19 in which he incurred spinal injuries that left him paralyzed from his chest down. The book was written 19 years later, when he is 38 and has lived half of his life as a walking person, and half in a wheelchair. His accident was in 1976, before the Americans with Disabilities Act went into effect, and he came across many, many barriers to success, but he smashed through them show more -- not without some anger and bitterness. He never let his disability get in the way of what he wanted, and he seemed to always want to take the most challenging route. I felt equal parts exasperation and admiration as I read the essay-like chapters of his life story that told the briefest amount about his life before the accident and most detailed his adventures after, including his jobs, family, personal life, and medical details. He worked in radio, including becoming an NPR foreign correspondence, and later a TV news journalist. He visited war-torn countries and regions in crises, including Israel and Palestine, Iraq, and Somalia. He's a good writer and really lays it all out without holding back. He's a complex person with a lot of motivation and drive, and a lot of stubbornness and anger, and a lot of compassion too. I learned so much reading this book. It's been 19 additional years since it was published -- I hope John Hockenberry is still finding adventures that satisfy him but I also hope he's found a bigger measure of peace too in the years that have passed. show less