Stop Committing Voice Suicide

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Summary: Dr. Morton Cooper uses simple, natural voice techniques
Review: Dr.Morton Cooper points out how simple, natural voice techniques of finding and using one's true voice rather than a forced, "authoritative" or other phony voice can help avoid horrendous problems such as losing one's voice, cancer, or other emergency situations. He avoids toxic "therapies" and surgery to "cure" loss of voice and instead goes to the cause of these extreme problems leading to prevention.

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Summary: Not as useful as it sounds
Review: Dr.Morton Cooper points out how simple, natural voice techniques of finding and using one's true voice rather than a forced, "authoritative" or other phony voice can help avoid horrendous problems such as losing one's voice, cancer, or other emergency situations. He avoids toxic "therapies" and surgery to "cure" loss of voice and instead goes to the cause of these extreme problems leading to prevention.

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Summary: disappointing
Review: In my opinion this book serves as one large advertisement for Dr. Cooper. It gives him a chance to toot his own horn. I would have found it much more useful had it provided a step by step progression of excercises to help people use their natural voice. Even had he let people know how to pick an appropriate voice clinician would have been nice. One good thing is that it does give hope to people with voice problems.

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Summary: One page of information, 169 pages of meandering drivel
Review: In short, he says to focus the voice in the mask (the nose and lip area), breath from the 'midsection' (or, abdomin, as most would call it...) and speak at your optimal pitch level. All the rest is Dr. Morton raging against the vocal establishment machine, and telling us how horrible most all ENT advice is.

Save your money; I wish I had saved mine...

Instead, see any of Patsy Rodenburg's books.

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Summary: Travel Magazine Review 1996
Review: Review from Travel MagazineJune 8, 1996This book is addressed to people suffering from sore throat, throat clearing, weak voice, poor projection, pain when talking, stangled voice, voice strain, hoarse voice, lump in throat, tired voice, deep-throat voice, pain when talking, throat tension, or nasality. Much of the book is about coping with strangled voice, medically known as spasmodic dysphonia. A decade ago, the fashionable treatment for this was surgery on the vocal cords, & now it's injection of one of the cords with a small amount of botulinum toxin, a deadly drug, often referred to as botox. The injection causes partial paralysis of a vocal cord, & brings the voice back, on a temporary basis, for varying periods from a month to 6 months. A recent price for the injection was $500. Dr. Cooper is a maverick who decries both surgery & botox, along with a host of palliative treatments that don't help at all. His ultrasimple solution is to first make sure you're breathing in the diaphragm & not the chest, then press the area between the ribs & just at the bottom of the breastbone while humming, then say a word such as "Right" while humming. A resonance should be felt around the nose & lips, indicating that this is the correct placement of the sound. Dr. Cooper believes most vocal troubles come from placing the sound too low in the chest or too high in the head. He cites "miraculous" immediate success with some patients, including celebrities, & good results over time with many others. If you have a voice problem, this is a book you should read.

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Summary: Some reals pearls to be found amongst endless repetition...
Review: There are some invaluable ideas and solutions in this book to help anyone with a voice disorder. The book has certainly helped me. Unfortunately the book is very frustrating in that it has very little structure and endless repetition of Dr Cooper's odds with the establishment. I had to read the entire book because I wanted to be sure of extracting every practical piece of information it contained regarding my voice problems. Apart from that I would have set it down very early.

Dr Cooper endlessly trumpets on about how he pioneered Direct Voice Rehabilitation against critiscm from the rest of the medical community. He devotes a whole chapter to questioning the ethics of the wider medical establishment in respect of the accepted treatment of voice problems. Why? I just want to know about how to fix my voice not join the revolution!

Consequently, the book could have been about a third of the size and a lot more focused on practical solutions for the reader. I have begun to read his other book, "Change Your Voice, Change Your Life" and so far, I fear that this is the better book with essentially the same information that I need.