"My Stroke of Luck" by Kirk Douglas	"My Stroke of Luck" is a Good Read! by Michael J. Roberts March 2002
Kirk Douglas’s memoir about recovering from a stroke "My Stroke of Luck " is right on the money and achieves the author’s intent of aiding his own healing by giving something back to the world. There is nothing to disappoint the reader in this book. The sepia dust jacket photo of a white-haired, granite individual featured with arms folded across his chest sets the tone. Here is a strong man sharing something important he has learned with the rest of us. Generally I tend to be cautious about books by celebrity authors, reasoning that the book’s merit and even publication are due to the author’s celebrity. That is not the case in Douglas’s book. It stands on its own. Douglas has penned several other books. This one is good enough to pique the reader’s interest in his other efforts. It was a quick can’t put it down kind of read. The only disappointment, if it can be called that, being that the book was finished too soon. "My Stroke of Luck" Kirk Douglas Hardcover/ Paperback / Narrated / HarperCollins Publishers, Incorporated / January 2002		As a stroke survivor, myself, several things that Douglas said rang true for me. He mentions, at the age of 83, feeling that strokes were things that only happen to old people. A physician friend of mine commented to that I was much too young, at 49, to have a stroke. I said "everyone is." An anecdote about children at a soccer field mistaking Douglas’s wife Anne for his daughter reminded me of a similar experience of my own. Hearing about an uncontrollable nosebleed brought on by blood thinners made the occasion where one of my eyelids bled for three days after having a keratinous growth removed made me connect with Douglas’s experience too. Douglas is clear and straightforward about his fear of not being able to act again. He mentions others who have been inspirations for him including Patricia Neal, Christopher Reeves, Helen Keller and FDR. On the one hand I wished I could have read this book sooner and on the other I suspect that I may not have appreciated it nearly as much without having lived through the same fears. In that sense we can all share in Douglas’s luck.
"What the hell are they talking about? A stroke! I just came out of this same hospital a month ago, after enduring an operation on my back from my helicopter crash. Strokes are for elderly people, with slurred speech, moving about in walkers or wheelchairs. I was only eighty; how can a stroke happen to me? Does that mean there will be no golf tomorrow?" Kirk Douglas from "My Stroke of Luck"
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