Product Description

One Tuesday afternoon Allen Rucker, Hollywood comedy writer and family man, wakes from a nap to find himself paralyzed from the waist down. Shocking? Yes. Unfair? Absolutely. Reality? Inescapably. Rucker is shaken up and angry, but soon realizes he's stuck in a wheelchair forever. He begins to reevaluate everything in his life, from the simplest bodily functions to the mysteries of the universe. Luckily, he's invited us along on the bumpy, poignant, and often hilarious road to recovery that leads him to completely redefine his life.

The Best Seat in the House is Rucker's unpretentious, unapologetic, refreshingly comic, and powerfully heartfelt paean to life and its fragility, and to the resilience and adaptability of a single, normal, very funny human being.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #653795 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-01
• Released on: 2007-01-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Rucker (The Sopranos: A Family History) has written many TV shows, including the 2005 Peabody Award–winning Vietnam documentary, Two Days in October. At 51, he became a victim of transverse myelitis, a rare neurological disorder that left him paralyzed from the waist down. Opening with an entertaining, sarcastic glimpse at the TV industry and his struggles to script amusing "patter for splashy Hollywood ego fests," he interrupts the fun with a chilling account of the two hours in 1996 when he suddenly became paralyzed. Learning to reprogram his life at L.A.'s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, he felt "fear, guilt, loss, more fear" and had crying jags plus the shame and embarrassment of bowel accidents. Listing a litany of "pride-bruising indignities,"such as being gawked at and carried up stairs "like a beanbag chair," he explains how he confronted each new challenge. With many pages devoted to dealing with the "overly kind" able-bodied and their self-conscious attitudes, this potent memoir is also an effective how-to guidebook for anyone who is disabled. Rucker is a gifted observer-humorist, unleashing a straight-arrow honesty and a vibrant, penetrating wit while probing the most intimate aspects of contemporary life and human behavior. (Jan. 9)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
TV writer Rucker likes to think he's on the cutting edge of what lies in the future for all of us. Truth be told, he is. In our hearts, we all know we will one day lose our independence to the ravages of old age and/or illness. Rucker doesn't make it seem as bad, however, as many anticipate. The limiting problem for him is transverse myelitis, which struck him from out of the blue when he was a mere 51 years old and in excellent health. In an hour and a half on a Tuesday afternoon, the able-bodied runner was thrown back to some of the physical helplessness of infancy by paralysis from the waist down. Ten years later, and with self-deprecating humor, he is able to walk--er, roll--through the ups and downs of being wheelchair bound. He has two rules: never whine, and never ask "Why me?" since that leads only to whining. He does lament the lack of positive wheelchair role models in the movies. Meanwhile, he's a good literary role model. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Rucker’s established penchant for jaded humor, along with his willingness to indulge the reader’s curiosity, makes The Best Seat in the House...one of the most engaging disability memoirs to date....should be required reading for the disabled and able-bodied alike." -- New Mobility

"This valuable book is full of surprises....Frankly written, the human struggle is most touching." -- Sante Fe New Mexican

"Very moving, not scary. [Rucker] is a talented man." -- David Chase, writer of "The Sopranos"

"hardly sentimental...[a] savvy contribution...ahead of the curve." -- New York Times

Customer Reviews

Buy this book!
This is one of those books everyone should read. Parents, buy it for your teenagers. Teenagers, buy it for your parents. Infertile Adults, buy it for your friends. "Best Seat in the House" is touching without being schmaltzy and laugh-out-loud funny at just the right moments. I'm not one of those people who breezes through books (my eyes normally tire out after 30 minutes or so). This one I picked up around 6 pm and finished around 2 am, never pausing to eat, drink, or acknowledge my girlfriend. I can't over-recommend this book. I bought it yesterday and am already referring to it as a "classic".

I laughed, I cried...I loved this book! Very inspirational memoir!
While it's not a topic many of us wish to think about -- the potential of waking up someday with some life-altering condition that will literally force us to rethink everything about our lives and how to go about it -- this book is an incredibly worthwhile read.

As another reviewer noted, it's a great book to buy for anyone that could benefit from a little understanding of the disabled point of view. What struck me most about this book (other than the fact that I read it in two days, which is fast for me as a WAHM) was that Rucker is so open about the feelings he experienced -- and without coming across as feeling sorry for himself. Quite the contrary -- Rucker kind of seems to have used his condition as a kick in the pants for his life overall. So a pivotal event that for most others would be devastating is, for him, enlightening.

I found this book to be incredibly inspirational overall -- and I think it will find an audience with anyone who has ever wondered about the disabled person's experience.

I'll be buying this book for others for a long time to come, I think. A great, great story.

Wisdom Wrapped In Humor And Good Sense
A friend of mine told me about "Best Seat In The House", and said it was really, really funny. I said, "Okay, a guy wakes up one morning and he's paralyzed. How funny can that be?" Well it is funny, hilarious in places. But it's also poignant and sensible and thought-provoking and incredibly readable. I later learned that Allen Rucker was the guy who wrote "White People In America" along with Martin Mull. That was maybe the first mock documentary I ever saw, and is still the funniest. Rucker has a great take on life, and it's been fine-tuned by this paralysis in a way that's turned him into a wise philosopher with a lousy spine but a heckuva funnybone.