Avis

This is a very special book because Paul Brockelhurst combines two things : he's an ex-PWS so he lived through the agony and the suffering related to stuttering, and he was also a researcher in that field so he has a scientific background. The combination of the two makes the book very appealing.
The book is also well written, in many paragraphs there is a sort of a “detached” humour that made me laugh.
For me, the main take-away messages of the book are :
- a person stutters because he/she anticipates or evaluates speech negatively.
- your speech doesn't have to be perfect because there isn't such thing as perfect speech, especially if you have an underlying impediment like most stutterers have (their speech is generally more error-prone than non-stutterers).
- you can't overcome stuttering without healing the whole person. In that regard, Zen and meditation were crucial for Paul.
- the relation between stuttering and dopamine. It is the most solid hypothesis that I 've ever read about stuttering.
"The perfect stutter" was a mind blowing reading, few people understand and explains stuttering like Paul Brockelhurst does.