The autobiography of a film star may seem irrelevant to a science book site but I would argue strongly for the inclusion of this one. Reeve, as everyone knows, suffered a high spinal cord injury (SCI) in 1995 and this book is as much the story of that and its consequences as it is of his previous existence. Born into a wealthy family, he became an actor at age 15. His dismayed parents obliged him to complete his college education but then he was off. Superman was his only real success; faced with a career in the doldrums he turned to learning to fly his private plane; learning to sail an ocean-going yacht; and competitive show-jumping. It was in the course of the latter that he met with his accident. The fracture was between the first and second cervical vertebrae: as high as you can get and survive (with intensive help). It left him completely tetraplegic: paralysed completely, effectively all except his heart, from the neck down. He was the typical high SCI: young, healthy, athletic male. In the sections dealing with his life before, you never hear of him reading a book, listening to music (he could play the piano, but music meant performance) or even sitting and thinking.

He was no dumbbell, as he later proved, just a normal rich youngster who had never had to think before doing anything before. He recounts the scenes in ITU, what he remembers and what told (his mother wanted to pull the plug then and there, but his wife prevented her doing so without Reeve's permission); the time in rehab; the time after he went home and decided to build a new life as a spokesman for spinal injury and paralysis patients. It is, as far as I know, the first and only account of what this experience is like for the patient, physically, emotionally, socially, sexually and economically, to be written for popular consumption. He does not flinch in recording how he urinates, defecates, manages his sexuality, copes with his inner demons like regret, jealousy, fantasising, depression. He turned his excellent brain to understanding exactly what had happened to his body and where the state of research into this and allied conditions had got to. He set up a foundation specifically to fund research, including all the oddball notions that never got past conventional funding authorities or ethics committees. He raised a lot of money, and public awareness, while battling with health insurance companies who wanted to brush him under the carpet. Reeve never did walk again. The most he achieved was a little movement in one finger. And the final irony, which he could not have known, of course, was that he was to die in 2004, in the middle of all his high-tech equipment, and after submitting as a guinea-pig to umpteen designer-drug trials, from septicaemia following an infected bedsore. An outcome which has terminated SCI patients from time immemorial: a lack of the most simple, basic, precautionary, nursing and medical care. There's a lesson there somewhere.