This review is from the september/October issue of the ragged edge.  The
book "Planet of the Blind" is available from Recording for the Blind on
tape and the National Library Service on tape and in Braille, for those
living in the United States. Incidentally, the author of the review, who
is blind herself, read these books using a PC-based scanning system.  
sure, go out and buy these books yourself and read them independently,
as the reviewer suggests, if
one is as fortunate as the reviewer is to have scanning software that can
cost a thousand dollars.

kelly 


   
   Book reviews
    Personal details, social constructs
   mark books on blindness
   reviews by Sally Rosenthal

   
   Planet of the Blind by Stephen Kuusisto. The Dial Press, 1998. 194
          pages, $22.95
          
     On Sight and Insight: A Journey Into the World of Blindness by John
     M. Hull. Oneworld Publications, 1997. 234 pages, $11.95
     
     On Blindness: Letters Between Bryan Magee and Martin
     Milligan.Oxford University Press, 1996. 188 pages, $19.95
     
     (order these books online at end of review)
     
     I have a confession to make. I don't usually read books about
     blindness anymore. In fact, having lost most of my vision, I
     usually avoid them in favor of a good escapist detective novel.
     
     Such was not always the case. In the early days of my becoming
     blind, I read everything I could find about visual impairment;
     social histories, memoirs, and self-help volumes lined my bookshelf
     as I attempted to gain perspective and learn from others. It took
     some time and effort to sift through the books that publishers
     claimed to be "inspiring" and "courageous," but there really were
     some good, savvy books by blind authors who helped me make an
     easier transition from a fully sighted world. With time (and
     increasingly deteriorating sight), though, I became less and less
     interested in reading about blindness. Call it denial, call it
     saturation, but I had had my fill and ignored the subject for
     years.
     
     Until one day earlier this year, that is. Immersed in writing, I
     was only half listening to the radio announcement of an upcoming
     National Public Radio call-in talk show. Suddenly, the fact that
     the scheduled guest, Stephen Kuusisto, would discuss his new book
     Planet Of The Blind caught my attention. And, OK, I'll admit
     it--even my interest. NPR, as any radio junkie knows, promotes the
     literate, the esoteric, and the controversial, but, never to my
     knowledge, the "inspirational." I decided to turn off the computer
     and give Kuusisto a listen.
     
     And it's a good thing that I did. Otherwise, I would have missed
     hearing about one of the best books on living with blindness that I
     have ever read. Only part of my conviction comes out of the fact
     that I, like Kuusisto, have retinopathy of prematurity and, also
     like the author, had spent most of my life appearing more sighted
     than blind before undergoing a significant loss of any residual
     vision in middle age. Personal histories aside, however, Kuusisto
     is an articulate, astute observer and a riveting writer. Ten
     minutes into the NPR interview, I was ordering his book from an
     online bookstore.
     
     Stephen Kuusisto, shown wearing dark glasses while posing with his
     guide dog Corky on the dust jacket of Planet Of The Blind, works as
     the director of student services at Guiding Eyes for the Blind, one
     of the country's best-known guide dog schools. For most of his
     life, however, the child born prematurely in 1955 whose retinas
     were permanently damaged from complications of prematurity and
     subsequent incubator time eschewed any such formal connections to
     blindness.
     
     He had a number of reasons for this: He wanted to appear as
     "normal" as possible. His family had its share of denial and guilt.
     And at the time, there were in fact very few options for him. His
     family's (and, indeed, society's) insistence on stressing his
     remaining vision was to lead Kuusisto on a lifelong journey through
     a world he was, as a person with a profound vision impairment,
     ill-equipped to navigate and handle.
     
     In a time before Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act--and long
     before the Americans With Disabilities Act and most of the adaptive
     equipment in use today--Kuusisto struggled to read standard
     textbooks and to compete in a classroom that had never heard of
     mainstreaming. The only other option, education at a school for the
     blind, didn't fit the family's plan for educating the little boy
     who had realized early on the importance of "passing." He continued
     to do so until an accident in graduate school and later cataracts
     took most of his remaining vision.
     
     Planet Of The Blind relates Kuusisto's personal experiences of
     coming to terms with his blindness and with his going public after
     a lifetime of shame and denial. The steps he takes will be familiar
     to anyone who has been there, but they are even more important for
     their message of advocacy and enlightenment.
     
     While I am sure that Kuusisto wrote this book knowing that he would
     strike a chord in the blind community, I feel equally certain that
     Planet Of The Blind was also written for a nondisabled audience.
     Kuusisto's message is clear: We've come a long way, but, despite
     the social changes made since his childhood, we still have a long
     way to go before people who are blind are viewed and treated as
     full citizens. But, his message also contends, there is freedom,
     independence, and empowerment in joining the struggle.
     
     Having read Planet Of The Blind I was hooked. What else had been
     published about blindness (sans inspirational overtones) recently?.
     A woman with a mission, I went back to the internet to search--and
     came away rewarded with two very different books by, oddly enough,
     two blind academics from England.
     
     The first of these books, On Sight And Insight: A Journey Into The
     World Of The Blind by John M. Hull, is actually a revised and
     expanded version of the author's 1990 book, Touching The Rock.
     Since Hull's previous book was one I had devoured in earlier days,
     I was curious to see how this professor of religion and education
     who became totally blind at 45 now wanted readers to see his (and,
     ultimately, any blind person's) world.
     
     As it turns out, Hull's new book is, paradoxically, excellent and
     somewhat troubling. Like Planet Of The Blind, On Sight And Insight
     is a book written for both a blind and sighted audience. Hull takes
     his readers on what the subtitle of his book promises; the journey
     he describes is startlingly accurate and thoughtfully written. Hull
     reaches for and finds the perfect balance: presenting personal
     details of his own life and then transposing these details into a
     social construct around blindness in general.
     
     Like Kuusisto, he writes of the need for people with visual
     impairment to function wholly in a society that is not, in many
     cases, open to inclusion. What troubles me about Hull's book,
     though, is his exclusion of any specific discussion about important
     subjects such as employment opportunities and discrimination in
     England. Although he refers to his own struggle at work, he fails
     to relate this struggle to a larger social one in a country in
     which disability rights groups are clamoring for legislation
     similar to the ADA. A small point, perhaps, for criticism of an
     otherwise excellent book; Hull might be excused for this omission
     since his starting point is more personal than global.
     
     Unlike Hull, blind activist and philosophy professor Martin
     Milligan always uses the personal as a jumping-off point to the
     larger world. In On Blindness, Milligan and sighted philosopher and
     broadcaster Bryan Magee embark on an exchange of philosophical
     letters . Initially undertaken as an exercise to understand how
     people (sighted and blind) gain knowledge and function in the
     world, the correspondence took on a life and theme of its own as it
     progressed. Always cogent and fierce in his assertions that those
     of us who are blind can and do function as fully as those with
     sight, Milligan nonetheless is also adamant about the oppression
     blind people face in daily life and in the larger social context.
     
     Magee and Milligan, through this fascinating exchange that ended
     abruptly with Milligan's unexpected death, seem to be engaged in a
     philosophical fencing match in order to establish views and draw
     each other out. Magee's lucid, on-target summary that closes the
     book is a tribute to his activist friend. On Blindness then,
     although not light reading, is an exciting and enlightening
     ex-change. It stands as a legacy to all that Milligan fought for
     and against in his life as an undaunted activist.
     
     Although all three authors share the same experience of blindness
     and approach it from both a personal and an activist vantage point,
     their books each stand alone as important movement works. Not
     having come across anything that smacks of "inspiration" in any of
     them, I just might have to put aside those detective novels now and
     then to keep up with what's going on in the world I now inhabit.
     
     Bookends section:
     Michigan Quarterly Review looks at "Disability, Art and Culture"
     
     The Spring and Summer 1998 issues of Michigan Quarterly Review were
     devoted to "Disability, Art, and Culture." The two-volume set
     follows the 1995 "This/Ability" conference on disability and the
     arts at the University of Michigan. Uneven but important, it's
     material you really need to have if you're interested in where
     "disability culture" is in academia today.
     
     Issue editors Susan Crutchfield and Marcy Epstein offer up a
     kitchen sink worth of poetry, fiction, essay and criticism from
     everyone from Tobin Siebers (who perhaps got contribute because of
     his position as acting Chair of the Department of English at the
     University of Michigan and the fact that he happens to have what's
     referred to in the PR as a "a polio-induced disability" but whose
     essay belongs in the genre of things that are better criticized by
     a volume such as this than a part of it) to Joseph Grigely, who
     contributes his groundbreaking "Postcards to Sophie Calle," first
     issued in 1991--itself a work of art as much as criticism, in which
     Grigely ponders, among other things, the nexus of language and the
     appropriation of "the disabled" by non-disabled artists. The
     volumes are worth getting if just to read Grigely. Also fascinating
     is the subtext one can read in the essay by the writer F. D. Reeve,
     a professor of comparative literature at Wesleyan College whom
     disability activists may be more interested in as being the father
     of Christopher Reeve.
                                      
   © Copyright 1998 The Ragged Edge
   
   


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html