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Christina Crosby, A Body, Undone:\u00a0Living On After Great Pain<\/em>. NYU\u00a0Press, 2016.<\/p>\n Reviewed by Ayesha Ahmad<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There is a paradox in\u00a0Professor Christina Crosby\u2019s biography A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain\u2013<\/em>the paralysis that constrained\u00a0her body so suddenly seems to have freed the language that we all possess and contain but which is generally consigned to a\u00a0particular place in space and time.<\/p>\n Details about Crosby\u2019s accident are astute, acute, and actual\u2014there is no reflection, reliving or ruminating. The scene shared\u00a0is that of Crosby on a cycling ride. Three\u00a0miles into the 17 mile bicycle ride that was woven into a larger tapestry of 1000 miles to commemorate her 50th<\/sup> birthday, the fateful accident occurred. The journey stopped being a physical endeavour, instead reaching plateaus and crevices that became Crosby\u2019s new lived experience.<\/p>\n The book requires the reader to become a traveller. We must leave the\u00a0comfort of our previously held thoughts and beliefs. We must accept that we can no longer look behind at our past. We must embrace the fact that we are now in a new territory. We need new concepts, new identities and new sensations to experience the life that we are continue to\u00a0breathe. We know that we are living\u00a0in a new dimension\u2014a different time and space to where we once walked and talked and wrote and sang, and celebrated our stories. As Crosby writes:<\/p>\n \u201cYour body has and is a history\u201d (p. 50)<\/p>\n This history becomes a vacuum. Crosby\u2019s accident shows the fragility of life, and also reveals how\u00a0our lives can be filled endlessly with triumphs and tragedies, and that these events can happen in any order, at any time, and at any cost. This is the\u00a0vulnerability of our lives\u00a0that Crosby sees\u00a0as signifying our incompleteness. The way we treat our vulnerability, then, is a marker of\u00a0how we find our completeness.<\/p>\n A Body, Undone<\/em>\u00a0spoke to me. Crosby\u2019s resonated with\u00a0me as\u00a0her words created echoes and magnified the dusty corners where I have been living within myself. Her words helped me to regain a sense of living. I experienced\u00a0a transcendence while reading the book. A Body, Undone<\/em> is\u00a0not a book about paralysis, about the loss of feeling, the inability to feel physical pain. Instead, it is about the\u00a0body transformed. As is clearly evident throughout the narrative, it is Crosby\u2019s masterful skill of language that navigated this transformation. Her voice resonates in the observation that:<\/p>\n