John Hockenberry's autobiography Moving Violations, A Memoir: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence is successful for a variety of reasons. He is a gifted writer, a masterful storyteller, and a man who has overcome an automobile accident at the age of nineteen which left him paralyzed from the waist down. He has lived a remarkable and fascinating life as a world-travelling journalist, and, most importantly, demonstrates not only a powerful determination to succeed at his profession and enjoy life, but also an inspirational sense of humor in the most harrowing of situations. He never uses his disability as an excuse, but instead paints a self-portrait which finally transcends that disability. As he writes in the final words of the book, referring to a Somalian boy who is on the verge of starving to death: "The thin boy could not have survived for long after I left the village. Or perhaps he is living now. I can still see him watching me. When he looks into my eyes, he sees no wheelchair" (367).
Hockenberry does not say so, but it is clear that there is an identification which passes back and forth between the starving boy and himself. The boy, Hockenberry says, has accepted the nearness, the possibility, the inevitability of death. Perhaps Hockenberry has not accepted death, but he has certainly accepted his paralysis, and has learned to deal with it successfully and with abundant good humor.
It is ironic that Hockenberry emphasizes the role of his paralysis in his development as a man and a journalist, for this reader by the end of the book was thinking more about the wonders of life than about the paralysis of the author. This is not to say that Hockenberry's disability at some point disappears from the book as an important part of his life and work, but rather that it is seen and accepted as merely a part of the man, rather than what makes him most who he is. Hockenberry, in other words, with hi...