My Left Foot

A quite amazing autobiography.
A child is born with severe cerebral palsy to a poor family in Ireland in the 1930s. The child has extremely limited physical movements and control. But the family are supportive and the child is included in family activities - even if his siblings need to carry him around on a jury-rigged cart.
Against the odds, the child thrives. The only part of his body that the boy can control is his left foot - hence the title. He learns how to draw with chalk and pencils etc using his left foot. Gradually, he acquires writing skills. He grows mentally, and manages to assert his personality and intellect, inspite of the physical limitations.
A powerful book that should be more widely read.

Very good. Brown was young when he wrote his autobiography, and had led an extremely restricted life with minimal education, but his writing is clear, expressive, and engaging.

This is the amazing autobiography that the movie "My Left Foot" was based on. Sadly, It has gotten almost no attention. My library didn't even own a copy, and the copy I got was an original little nondescript hardback with yellowing brittle pages. It is a sweet, powerful, and awesome story, and, of course, the true story of his life. The story differs from the movie in many places. It is a very worthwhile read about an incredibly strong, loving, bright, funny, persevering spirit of a man with a family to match. If it were not for his mother and family, who treated him as a regular member of a family of 13 children (his mother had 22 pregnancies), he would have been institutionalized as a child and treated as "mentally defective".

I read this book on the cusp of the new millenium while I was in library school. As part of an assignment for my Popular Materials and Programming for Adults course, I wrote an annotation, which my professor, the incredible Dr. Linda Walling, lightly edited into the following version, for which she gave me an A-.

"Dublin teenager, profoundly disabled by cerebral palsy, intimately relates the lives of his sprawling family and their fellow poor. His angry, drunken father looms large in sharp contrast to his patient, virtuous mother. The author of My Left Foot mingles themes of birth and death with dream sequences in this, his fictionalized autobiography."

By the way, if you've never heard of, or read, Mr. Brown, I recommend checking him show more out. He wrote with one foot, literally. show less

A very easy and enjoyable read. I read this in one afternoon and was drawn in by his description of the characters and the straightforward writing style. I was moved by the main character and felt that I had an insight into his life.

Christy Browns's autobiography tells of his fight to prove his intelligence in the face of his struggles to communicate. A sensitively written and gentle book and easy to read because of that.

The warm, humorous and true story of christy Brown's supreme courage and triumph over the severest of handicaps.