By Justin A. Rice/Daily News CorrespondentWith just one leg and one lung, Jothy Rosenberg has spent his life pushing his body and mind to the limit on ski slopes, through whitewater rapids and in the ivory towers of Duke University. So it may be hard to believe that the cancer survivor's greatest challenge was chronicling his adventures in an independently published memoir called "Who Says I Can't."
"Writing is a challenging activity," said the 13-year Newton resident, who lost his right leg and left lung after being diagnosed with cancer when he was 16. "People had heard me tell my stories orally for years and said 'You gotta write these down.'
"I couldn't think of any better way to write them down than chronologically, in the order that they happened. (But) that's not the best way to write a memoir. The first version was a little too autobiographical; I went off on a lot of tangents. It ended up being a cathartic experience, but it was not interesting to anyone else."
After five years of writing, rewriting and pitching publishers, Rosenberg's book, a survival story told from the everyman's perspective, will be mass-distributed on Feb 1.
"When you spend five years maniacally focused on getting something done, that's a hard thing," he said. "This was the book I needed at a certain time, and it didn't exist."
A Dec. 16 launch party will be held at the Needham headquarters of the Pan-Mass Challenge. Racing seven times in the nearly 200-mile bike-a-thon that raises money for cancer research, Rosenberg has raised $52,000 for PMC and will donate a portion of his book's proceeds to the organization.
The 53-year-old says writing his book, which he began to outline in 2004 based on his blog entries, was even harder than completing his Ph.D in computer science at Duke University in five years.
Yet it's still hard to compare writing to competing in the annual swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco, which he has done 16 times.
"(Swimming)'s not just physically hard, it's intimidating," said Rosenberg, who keeps himself healthy by working out six times a week. "I do it because I sort of recommit myself to do something hard and lonely and make sure I stay fit. For me swimming became non-optional. It's my only defense against shortness of breath. Because I work hard at it, my lung capacity feels normal.
"It makes me feel good. It's something most people won't do. I beat a lot of two-leg athletes - that's very satisfying."
Three years after being diagnosed with osteogenic sarcoma, Rosenberg's cancer had spread, and doctors were forced to remove two-fifths of his left lung and to amputate his right leg five inches below his hip. Told he had no chance of survival, Rosenberg quit school at Kalamazoo College in his native Michigan to spend his final days on the ski slopes of Alta, Utah.
After skiing for 100 consecutive days without incident, Rosenberg decided to return to school. He completed his doctorate in computer science in 1983 and, after teaching at Duke for five years, moved to California to start the first of six tech companies he has founded over the years.
Eventually a software company he worked for sent him to Boston for what was supposed to be a year-long assignment. The Rosenbergs liked living in Newton so much they decided to stay for good.
Rosenberg continued his adventures on mountainsides and in rivers before showing a "stream-of-conscious" version of his book to his wife in 2004.
"She was horrified," Rosenberg recalled. "She said, 'You're not going to publish this?' Of course, the answer is 'no' whenever your wife asks a question like that."
Rosenberg agreed to help a friend launch a startup company in Oregon soon after. While spending countless two-week stretches holed up in the Oregon winter with nothing to do, he started to refine his book.
"One of the things that I was obsessive about in my mind was how to get my point across," he said. "I want to tell people how to fight back."
But the project was still much different than anything Rosenberg had done, including two computer science books he had published.
"Writing nonfiction, writing like this from the heart is very difficult, and I found a style that I was very comfortable with," he said. "It's a little folksy and has something that will make you smile. At least every two pages there's something very funny.
"The most challenging thing about writing is when someone reads your work. You're on the edge of your seat - are they going to like it, did I get the point across?
"One of the most challenging things, of course, is I'm hyper-sensitive to even the tiniest hint of a criticism. I can be self-critical; I can be brutal; but when someone else says, 'Oh, I didn't quite get that,' that just cuts me to the quick."
In 2007 Rosenberg called on a friend, Harvard professor Dan Kindlon, the author of "Raising Cain." Kindlon recommended his agent Kenny Wapner, who Rosenberg paid to help organize his story around a set of principles and concepts he wanted to convey.
Even with Wapner's help, publishers still weren't biting on the project. The most common feedback was that Rosenberg didn't have a platform or celebrity status.
"I said that's pretty hard for me to suddenly go get," Rosenberg said. "The fact is, that isn't the point of the book. I'm not famous, and most people who this happens to are not Michael J. Fox or Dorothy Hamill. What about them? How do Lance Armstrong's books inspire and motivate them? It's like reading a biography of someone famous, like John Adams, but you don't internalize it. It doesn't translate to 'What should I do to be like Lance Armstrong?"'
Eventually Rosenberg parted with Wapner and started exploring self-publishing options. After going down one bad road, he landed on independent publisher Bascom Hill Books, who liked the idea of a story being told from an everyman viewpoint.
"He's very down to earth for all that he's accomplished," said Cashman, Basocom's director of marketing. "He has an attitude that, just as his book says, 'Who says I can't?"'
Bascom also admired his persistence.
"Everyone has a story, and it's those who continue to speak up, to fight, to be vocal about their experiences, who are the ones who break through to a larger audience," Cashman said. "Being a first-time author, it's not an easy thing to do to get your message out there. I'd say Jothy is one of most aggressive authors. He's making sure everything is covered.
"Amongst 10 million other projects, he gives this as much effort as he does to his full-time job, biking and volunteering. He's 100 percent in everything he does, and that's why he has broken through."
Now Rosenberg, who started working full-time for a BAE Systems earlier this year, is starting to get a platform of his own. The Today Show recently featured him, and he has launched a grassroots campaign to appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
"How many copies sold will I consider a success?" Rosenberg asks himself. "That's an arbitrary number. I guess if this got into 10,000 people's hands I'd feel pretty good; 100,000 would be a home run. But there are still 2.5 million amputees in this country, and there are 45 million people classified as having a disability.
"So 100,000 copies is not getting even that. As a personal goal, I have to consider it a success, but in terms of having made a big enough impact, not really."
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