If the 1995 stroke that paralyzed Jean-Dominique Bauby was cruelly premature, at least death had the courtesy to wait until the 45-year-old French journalist finished his last assignment. Less than 72 hours after readers and critics alike hailed as a triumph his memoir of living with locked-in syndrome--a state of virtually total paralysis that leaves the victim, in Bauby's words, "like a mind in a jar"--the former editor in chief of French Elle magazine died. Bauby's book Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Bubble and the Butterfly) is a celebration of life written by a man incapable of speech or movement.
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