This book by Jean-Dominique Bauby, now made into a movie, drawings you into Bauby's mind, trapped in his immovable body. As the editor of Elle fashion magazine, Bauby was forty-three years old when he suffered a massive stroke which left him in a coma for over twenty days and an imprisoned body when he awoke. While his mind was unaltered, the only part of his body he was able to move was his eyes and slight head movements. Bauby was left in a "locked-in" syndrome.

Learning an alphabet code, he communicated by blinking his eye, spelling out words and sentences. He is left dreaming of times past, food, traveling and struggling to come to terms with his altered life.

His speech therapist, Sandrine, spends hours translating this unique alphabet, and Bauby literally blinks the manuscript from July to August of 1996. Bauby's transports the reader into his world, now at a hospital, incorporating humor and vivid language to express the stark truth of his life so incredibly altered by the stroke.

The French edition of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was published in March of 2007, and sadly just ten days after the book was published, Bauby died. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly went on to become  best-seller. While the film takes liberties with the true story, Bauby's memoir is one of the only documentations of a first-hand perspective of locked-in syndrome. His story is fascinating, and you won't be able to put this book down!