Who was I? Was I who I had been before the crash? ... Was I what had been done to me? Were all of us the results of things done to us, done for us?
Part 4 of theTED Radio Hour episode Turning Points.
About Joshua Prager's TEDTalk
When Joshua Prager was 19, a devastating bus accident left him paralyzed on his left side. He returned to Israel twenty years later to find the driver who turned his world upside down. Prager tells his story and probes deep questions of identity, self-deception and destiny.
About Joshua Prager
Author and journalist Joshua Prager has created a career from telling stories of lives that changed in an instant. Over a decade-plus career at the Wall Street Journal, Prager began as a news assistant and worked his way up to senior writer.
While at the paper, Prager wrote about the world's only anonymous Pulitzer Prize winner, the unknown heir of the author of the children's book Goodnight Moon, and the backstory of how the 1951 New York Giants baseball team cheated their way to infamy, as told in his book The Echoing Green.
Today, Prager is focused on his own story: the 1990 bus accident that left him a hemiplegic at age 19. His new book Half-Life is about the accident and it explores identity and what it means to live a life changed in a single moment.
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