| 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.
For the two volumes, send a check for $14 (includes postage and handling) to: Michigan Quarterly Review, University of Michigan, 3032 Rackham Bldg., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1070.
Order these books online:
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- Planet of the Blind (hardcover) by Stephen Kuusisto
- Planet of the Blind (paperback - not yet published) by Stephen Kuusisto
- Planet of the Blind (Large Print) by Stephen Kuusisto
- Planet of the Blind (Alternative Formats) by Stephen Kuusisto
- Sight and Insight: A Journey Into the World of Blindness by John M. Hull
- On Blindness: Letters Between Bryan Magee and Martin Milligan
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