{"id":6527,"date":"2026-07-24T16:52:33","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T20:52:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/?post_type=product&p=6527"},"modified":"2026-07-24T16:54:37","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T20:54:37","slug":"motion-to-survive","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/product\/motion-to-survive\/","title":{"rendered":"Motion to Survive"},"content":{"rendered":"

Motion to Survive<\/span><\/span><\/em>\u00a0traces Joseph\u00a0<\/span>R.\u00a0<\/span>Urgo\u2019s understanding of Parkinson\u2019s disease not simply as a diagnosis, but as a revelation that reshapes the meaning of movement across his entire life. While Parkinson\u2019s is commonly associated with tremors and involuntary movement, Urgo focuses equally on dystonia: the freezing and stiffening of the body that traps motion altogether. Looking backward through this \u201cParkinsonian lens,\u201d he recognizes a lifelong fear of becoming stuck\u2014emotionally, professionally, and physically. The disease becomes a metaphor through which he reinterprets his past and examines the forces that drove his restless pursuit of change.<\/span><\/span>
<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>
<\/span>Spanning childhood memories and a forty-year academic career at eight institutions, where he served as professor, department chair, dean, provost, and president before retiring to Akron, Ohio, Urgo’s life was defined by continual transition: new campuses, new communities, and constant reinvention.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span>
<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>
<\/span>Through blending memoir, neurological reflection, and professional reckoning, Urgo bravely explores the uneasy relationship between ambition and mortality, learning to view the brain as both adversary and engine, as a force shadowed by self-destruction even as it propelled creativity, risk-taking, and achievement. <\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span>
<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>
<\/span>Motion to Survive<\/span><\/span><\/em> transforms Parkinson\u2019s from passive diagnosis into a way of understanding existence itself and reveals how memory, identity, and movement shape a life lived in constant motion and under increasing awareness of the body\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>fragility<\/span>.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

About the author<\/h2>\n

Joseph R. Urgo is a literary scholar and higher education leader whose work engages major figures in American literature, including William Faulkner and Willa Cather, alongside broader topics in American history and culture. Throughout his career, he advanced a strong commitment to\u00a0<\/span>access to<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>higher education, with an emphasis on the value of<\/span>\u00a0liberal<\/span>\u00a0arts. Urgo has held senior academic leadership positions at institutions across the country, including chair of the English department at the University of Mississippi, dean of faculty at Hamilton College, provost at UNC Asheville, and president of St. Mary\u2019s College of Maryland. After retiring to Akron, Ohio, he returned to service in a series of interim leadership roles, including provost and dean of arts and sciences, while adapting to life with Parkinson\u2019s disease. He lives with his wife, Lesley Dretar Urgo, in Canal Fulton, Ohio.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

Praise for Motion to Survive<\/em><\/h2>\n

For some academics, retirement ushers in long golf games and early happy hour. For Joseph R. Urgo, retirement ushered in a Parkinson\u2019s diagnosis and a deep need to interrogate his history through the lens of this \u201cmovement disorder.\u201d From his \u201c<\/span>eighteen-month hospitalization in a mid-century crippled children\u2019s ward\u201d at the age of five through a career notable not only for its success but for its extreme peripatetic nature\u2014it includes eight professional moves\u2014this is a well-written and fascinating study of the brain in motion.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Beth Ann Fennelly, author of The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs<\/i>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Joseph Urgo\u2019s <\/span>Motion to Survive <\/span><\/i>is a hauntingly multilayered book. Partly an account of crippling disability, partly a literary journey, partly a rags-to-riches American success story, partly a memoir of a peripatetic academic career, this powerful book traces both movements and inhibitions of movement throughout a lifetime. Emotionally moving and vividly portraying the experience of sickness and impairment, Urgo\u2019s book takes its place among the\u00a0very best\u00a0in disability writing, from Helen Kellar to Eli Clare.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Taylor Hagood, author of Faulkner, Writer of Disability<\/i><\/strong>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Motion to Survive\u2014<\/span><\/i>a searing<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/i>and<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/i>gripping intimate<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/i>memoir\u2014arrives when\u00a0nearly one\u00a0million people live with\u00a0Parkinson\u2019s Disease in the US and some ninety thousand are diagnosed annually.\u00a0<\/span>Author<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/b>Joseph R. Urgo chronicles life on Parkinson\u2019s \u201cmystical tour bus\u201d in clustered short chapters titled to pique curiosity. Fine-tuned masterly prose delivers Urgo\u2019s hard-won insights woven into the intriguing, poignant back story of a working-class boyhood and life as a husband and father with a distinguished career in the college and university classroom and in administrative leadership. \u201cParkinson\u2019s brings clarity,\u201d Urgo writes, \u201cas it suggests dividing one\u2019s life into chemical segments,\u201d meaning doses of medicines that alleviate symptoms in the face of elusive cures. <\/span>Motion to Survive <\/span><\/i>frankly confronts Parkinson\u2019s \u201cbrain fog\u201d and brain disorder, but Urgo\u2019s splendid book is the product of a first-rate mind.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Cecelia Tichi, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English Emerita, Vanderbilt University <\/strong>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Joseph R. Urgo has written a memoir that transcends autobiography to portray a crucial time in the history of the American academy as experienced by a gifted academic beset with Parkinson\u2019s disease. The early stages of Parkinson\u2019s, unrecognized by Urgo and his family, nonetheless shaped his personality, behavior, and a peripatetic academic career that brought him to leadership positions at a range of public and independent institutions. Urgo\u2019s narrative is at once informative and poignant, analytical and moving, broadly applicable and intensely personal. This book will provide a fascinating read for anyone interested in the intersection of an individual life with the crosscurrents of American higher education in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Terrence MacTaggart, former Chancellor, University of Maine System, Minnesota State University System, University of Wisconsin-Superior\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

In this fascinating inside narrative and oftentimes mordant dissection of a modern academic career, Joseph R. Urgo charts a restless and disturbing doubleness of alternating ascent and descent that is his own version of a spiritual guide for the perplexed. He retrospectively links his myriad successes and failures to the allegorical conceit of a \u201cmovement disorder\u201d that is both physical and psychological, a disease that is also an unease propelling him along many forking paths of teaching and administration in late twentieth century American higher education. In this latter-day pilgrim\u2019s progress, he encounters many sloughs of despond and vanity fairs, but his chief discovery is about the duality of his own self and the duplicity of the mission he initially undertook with such idealism and elan. To those who today nostalgically regard his era as a lost golden age of humanistic progress and abundance, Urgo\u2019s refreshingly candid yet searing self-confessions about the quirks and compromises along the way, augmented by the specter of illness that always stood in his path, sets the balance true about just how dark and slippery and consuming this professional road trip always was and always will be. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Barton Levi St. Armand, Professor Emeritus of American Civilization and English, Brown University<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Memoir on Moving Through Life with Parkinson’s<\/span><\/h2>\n

Joseph R. Urgo<\/h3>\n

Size: 6 x 9<\/p>\n

Page count: 228<\/p>\n

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