Kevin Michael Connolly | Double Take, A Memoir

Published: February 5, 2010

From the startling black and white images of people around the world gawking at a legless skateboarder to Kevin Connolly’s smart, funny and fiercely honest narrative, Double Take reads like a downhill skateboard ride: fast and utterly engrossing.

It begins with Connolly’s birth in 1985 at a Helena hospital, minus legs. “You were an exclamation point on a really tough couple of years,” his mom tells him later. So starts a story of courage, creativity and adaptation – Connolly’s own and that of his devoted and often-ingenious parents.

His father, inspired by the television series “MacGyver,” rigs up an array of devices that helps his son maneuver through life, and after a disastrous wrestling season, encourages his son to take up skiing. Connolly eventually excels at downhill racing on a monoski, taking second place in the 2006 X Games.

He began clicking photographs of people looking at him while visiting Vienna. Initially, he says, it was therapeutic, “a way in which I could vent my frustration about all the reactions I’d been subjected to while on the skateboard.”

But as a photography and film-production student at Montana State University, he decided to return to his travels with a better camera and to focus more on the quality of his images. The result was more than 30,000 photographs taken in 17 countries, and edited into “The Rolling Exhibition,” which has been featured at galleries and museums around the world, including the Smithsonian.

These riveting images, which open each chapter of his memoir, say volumes about our discomfort with disability and difference. Reactions (the perspective is always of people looking down at Connolly as he skates past) range from curiosity and pity to wonder and outright shock.

Publishers Weekly sums up the memoir this way, in a starred review: “The images are beautiful, revealing and stimulating – just like his narrative.”

For more information, visit www.kevinmichaelconnolly.com or www.therollingexhibition.com.

– Kristi Niemeyer