These three books are on D's summer reading list for Honors English. And since I had never read any of them, I decided to dig in while he was reading one of his other assigned books. I already posted about Licorice Laces, Orange Soda, and the curious incident of the dog in the night-time ; but this post is about The Diving Bell and The Butterfly by Jean-Dominque Bauby*. Quick synopsis: Bauby, editor-in-chief of French fashion bible Elle magazine, suffers a devastating stroke at age 43. The damage to his brain stem leaves him with locked-in syndrome - almost completely paralyzed and only able to communicate by blinking his left eye. Bauby painstakingly dictates his memoir via the only means of movement and expression left to him. I read that the book took approximately 200,000 blinks to write with the average word taking approximately two minutes to convey and transcribe. And on March 9, 1997, just two days after the book was published, Bauby died of pneumonia. Before I...