The autobiography of an Irish man born with cerebral palsy, who teaches himself to write and paint with his left foot and becomes a significant writer in Irish literature.

Read so long ago I cannot remember details except I remember author clearly. ( )

Very good. Brown was young when he wrote his autobiography, and had led an extremely restricted life with minimal education, but his writing is clear, expressive, and engaging. ( )

Excellent story, more matter-of-fact than the movie. ( )

I read this book on the cusp of the new millenium while I was in library school. As part of an assignment for my Popular Materials and Programming for Adults course, I wrote an annotation, which my professor, the incredible Dr. Linda Walling, lightly edited into the following version, for which she gave me an A-.

"Dublin teenager, profoundly disabled by cerebral palsy, intimately relates the lives of his sprawling family and their fellow poor. His angry, drunken father looms large in sharp contrast to his patient, virtuous mother. The author of My Left Foot mingles themes of birth and death with dream sequences in this, his fictionalized autobiography."

By the way, if you've never heard of, or read, Mr. Brown, I recommend checking him out. He wrote with one foot, literally. ( )

This is the amazing autobiography that the movie "My Left Foot" was based on. Sadly, It has gotten almost no attention. My library didn't even own a copy, and the copy I got was an original little nondescript hardback with yellowing brittle pages. It is a sweet, powerful, and awesome story, and, of course, the true story of his life. The story differs from the movie in many places. It is a very worthwhile read about an incredibly strong, loving, bright, funny, persevering spirit of a man with a family to match. If it were not for his mother and family, who treated him as a regular member of a family of 13 children (his mother had 22 pregnancies), he would have been institutionalized as a child and treated as "mentally defective". ( )

Christy Browns's autobiography tells of his fight to prove his intelligence in the face of his struggles to communicate. A sensitively written and gentle book and easy to read because of that. ( )

Inspiring story of overcoming the odds. ( )

A very easy and enjoyable read. I read this in one afternoon and was drawn in by his description of the characters and the straightforward writing style. I was moved by the main character and felt that I had an insight into his life. ( )