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0-89587-233-1
$21.95 hardcover
6" x 9"
178 pages black-and-white photographs
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Joe Martin has
ALS and can barely move a muscle, yet he is inspirational to all of us.
Every day with Joe offers the joys of living and the triumph of the
spirit. God's greatest gift to man is the brain, and Joe exemplifies the
brain in magnificent solo flight. His courage and wit shine through in
every way and on every page. Joe is truly my hero, and I feel privileged
to know him. --Dr. Stanley H. Appel, Professor and Chair of the
Department of Neurology and Director of the MDA/ALS Research Center,
Baylor College of Medicine
On Any Given Day
is a contemporary profile in courage. Joe Martin's quest for racial
reconciliation, while he clings doggedly to life, proves again that fact
is more inspiring than fiction. --Hugh B. Price, President, National
Urban League, Inc.
On November 22,
1998, Joe Martin maneuvered his motorized chair to his desk and to the
computer that let him type by bouncing an infrared beam off his eye as
he looked at a keyboard on the screen. ALS--Lou Gehrig's disease--had
deprived him of nearly all his muscle control. But ALS does not affect
the mind, and his mind now was filled with anger and determination.
Like millions of
Americans, Joe had just watched a 60 Minutes program in which
Jack Kevorkian "euthanized" a man. The man had Lou Gerhig's
disease and had begun to lose hope--just as Joe once had. But instead of
helping the man recover from the trauma of his condition, Kevorkian had
helped him abandon hope. Whatever good that man might have
accomplished--whatever purpose the rest of his life might have held--was
gone in the plunge of Dr. Death's syringe.
Joe Martin had
already outlived one doctor's prognosis by more than two years. He was
still building a career as what his boss called the
"conscience" of the largest bank in the United States. Since
being diagnosed with ALS, he'd helped start the Southeast's first
comprehensive center for ALS research and patient care. He'd begun a
movement to improve race relations in the Carolinas. Now, he was writing
a book.
Joe wanted that book
to tell people with serious problems not how to die but how to live.
He wanted to tell them how, on any given day, people could not predict
what might be possible with the help of understanding doctors, family
members, and friends and the oversight of a loving God.
That night, focusing
on each letter, comma, and space with his eyes, Joe composed an e-mail
to his collaborator on the book. The man on television, he wrote, had
died not from ALS but from hopelessness and terror.
"Hopelessness
and terror are both curable," the e-mail said. "Write
faster!"
about the authors
Joe Martin holds a doctorate in English from Duke University. He
helped engineer North Carolina National Bank's expansion into Florida,
the initial step in creating Bank of America, the nation's first
coast-to-coast banking corporation. He is a recipient of the Urban
League's Whitney M. Young Award and the Echo Foundation's Humanitarian
Award.
Ross Yockey is the author of
numerous nonfiction books, among them biographies of Hugh McColl, Zubin
Mehta, and Andre Previn. An Emmy Award winner, he has written
extensively for television. He has also written documentary films, one
of which was a winner at the New York International Film Festival.
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