I Have Something to Say Mastering the Art of Public Speaking in an Age of Disconnection

"In eleventh grade, John Bowe's cousin Bill asked a classmate to prom. She said no. Bill responded by moving to the family basement--and staying there for the next forty-three years. But in 1992, at the age of fifty-nine, Bill surprised everyone who knew him: he got married. Bowe learned that Bill credited his turnaround to a nonprofit club he'd joined called Toastmasters International. Fascinated by the idea that speech training seemed to foster the kind of psychological well-being more commonly sought through expensive psychiatric treatment, and intrigued by the notion that words could serve as medicine--healing the shy, connecting the disconnected, and mending our frayed social fabric--Bowe sets out to learn for himself what he'd gathered from so many others: when you learn to speak in public, you undergo a profound transformation that has very little to do with standing at a podium"--