A Brilliant Career

About the Book

On July 9th, 1980 I broke my neck in a waterskiing accident, which resulted in quadriplegia. A Brilliant Career proceeds in three parts. In Part I, I discuss my eight-month hospitalization, with flashbacks to an able-bodied trip to the East Coast taken ten days before my accident and ending with my narration of the accident. Part II contains vignettes of life in a wheelchair, difficult facts often retold with humor. Part III contains one-sentence to five-page reflections on what the disability might mean, this radical slowing down, from the perspective of having lived for twenty-six years between wheels.

About the Author

The author was poised for a career as a top-drawer trial attorney when he was rendered a quadriplegic after his first year of law school. After spending a year in hospitals, he returned to law school in a wheelchair to find his world changed radically in surprising ways. A Brilliant Career narrates his emerging experiences in the wheelchair that led to the core insight that it was not the accident, but instead how he responded to the accident, that was significant to his life. After graduation, he clerked for a federal district court judge and practiced corporate trial law for six years before representing women in custody disputes at the Legal Aid Society. After some time, he returned to the university to earn Master’s Degrees in Theology and Christian Spirituality. Mr. Ginn is the author of three books of poetry, and an article published in the The Thomas Merton Seasonal entitled “The Paradox of Silence”. He now practices Spiritual Direction and Legal Mediation, in addition to other ministries. Bob lives in Omaha, Nebraska with his wife and their two Siberians.