An Atypical Life
From a Johannesburg living room thick with whisky and smoke to the Caribbean swells, the Mexican jungle, the Israeli front line, Chernobyl, and the courtroom — the unfiltered story of one improbable life.
Born by accident on the highveld in 1967, David Buch has spent the better part of six decades stitching together a life that almost did not happen. Sea voyages with a charming, dangerous father. A child fugitive in the Caribbean. A teenager in war-time Israel. A man of measured IQ 149 who has worked on top-secret defence systems on three continents while quietly carrying late-diagnosed autism, ADHD, and a constant whispering voice telling him he is a fraud. This memoir is what happens when he finally answers it back.
What this book holds
What this book is about
It is a memoir, not a list of achievements. Personal scenes are recounted as they were experienced — the violent dance of two parents in a smoke-thick living room, a small boy sold an adventure that turned into a near-drowning, a teenager learning what war does to a city, a man building lives he could not always quite believe were his. The chapters are honest about the dark days and unashamed of the joy.
Who this book is for
Readers of memoir who want a true story told without polish or apology — the kind that lingers because the author was honest about everything, including the bits that are not flattering.
Late-diagnosed adults who have spent decades feeling like the wrong specification of human, and who suspect that the cost of pretending otherwise has been higher than anyone outside their head has noticed.
Anyone who loves the world for being strange — the smell of cordite on a Johannesburg balcony, a wooden hull creaking through the swells off St Helena, a small boy on a Mexican beach learning words for things he had no other way to name.