Description

"My favorite nonfiction book of the past 25 years... humane and angry and subtle and heartbreaking. I give it to people all the time."--Dwight Garner, The New York Times

A powerful memoir of survival, resilience, and reconstruction, One Equal Music is the story of a journalist who must learn to find his voice and his way after the very foundations of his life are rocked by an act of violence.

On January 7, 2015, two men force their way into the Paris offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and open fire. The attack leaves 12 dead and 11 injured, and shockwaves radiating across the world. A global solidarity movement unites instantly under the banner Je suis Charlie, and a fierce debate ignites over the freedom of the press.

Journalist, author, and weekly Charlie Hebdo contributor Philippe Lançon is among those gravely wounded. His world is upended, he will spend months in hospital, undergoing multiple reconstructive surgeries and somehow, impossibly, trying to learn live again.

With compassion, honesty, erudition, humor, and panache, Lançon delivers an astonishing, intimate, and unique portrait of one man's shifting relationship to time, to the people taking care of him, to writing and journalism, to truth, and, most of all, to his own body.