From a Washington Post review by Lisa Zeidner headlined “In his moving memoir, John Cotter anticipates a world without sound”:

When John Cotter suddenly began to suffer from deafness, tinnitus and roiling vertigo at the age of 30, he found himself thrust into a medical mystery. In “Losing Music,” he chronicles his experience with what was eventually diagnosed as Ménière’s disease, a rare — and incurable — condition that affects an estimated 750,000 people in the United States. By age 35, fitted with hearing aids that only partly helped, he was walking with a cane, prone to unpredictable fits of vomiting, unable to reliably work and unsure about how much longer he would be able to hear at all.