John Hockenberry

Put simply, this is an astounding autobiography. Hockenberry's work brilliantly integrates a variety of intriguing themes. He highlights the challenges that people who have disabilities face each day. He offers insights into the world of broadcast journalism. He sheds light on conflicts in the Middle East. He tackles complicated family relationships. "Moving Violations" is skillfully written and -- in many spots -- is positively hilarious. As the news director of the NPR stations in Western New York, I had the pleasure of meeting Hockenberry in 2017 when he visited Buffalo. I'm glad he visited our region. Otherwise, I may have never picked up this fine work.… (meer)

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 -- 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.… (meer)

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 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.… (meer)