Finding my voice

the long version

"In Finding My Voice, the nationally acclaimed public radio host Diane Rehm tells the story of her remarkable life - a story in three acts. First, her childhood: She was raised in a traditional Christian Arab household - her parents were immigrants from the Near East who had a grocery store in Washington, D.C."--BOOK JACKET. "Then, in her thirties, as she found her life as a housewife/mother starting to push her into depression, Rehm began by a stroke of good fortune to volunteer at WAMU-FM, then a small public radio station in Washington, and found that she loved radio and was good at it. She had found her metier. Six years later she had her own show, hosting politicians, artists, writers, musicians, and scientists, including Hillary Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Carl Sagan, Francis Crick, Salman Rushdie, and Norman Mailer, among thousands of others. Twenty years after she began, her talk show is distributed nationally by National Public Radio (NPR) and reaches more than 700,000 listeners each week."--BOOK JACKET. "Finally, Finding My Voice recounts Rehm's recent frightening battle with a rare neurological disorder, spasmodic dysphonia (SD), a condition that "creates a stranded hoarseness [and] fills [her] voice with tremors." A radio broadcaster's nightmare, the loss of her voice took her off the air for an extended period of time and into a frantic - and successful - search for treatment. As she has with other trials in her life, Rehm has faced this ongoing struggle with fortitude, insight, and pluck."--BOOK JACKET.