"Sit back and let me tell you my tale, of a journey that took me through dark times, yet gave me a gift that I treasure. That gift is this story, which I now pass on to you--a tale of lost horses and found wisdom, of buried treasures and wild strawberries, of the beggar king and the secret of happiness."
The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness is a true story about a storyteller who loses his voice and believes he has lost everything. Joel's own story took a sharp twist in the summer of 1997, when he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Though usually a treatable form of the the disease, in his case there was a strange complication: when he awoke from surgery he discovered that he could no longer speak. So Joel began an adventure as strange as any story Joel had ever told, which was to become the basis for his book.
