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Living With Vision Loss - Personal Experiences
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Touch the Top of the World: A Blind Man's Journey to Climb Farther Than the Eye Can See
by Erik Weihenmayer
Erik Weihenmayer was born with retinoscheses, a degenerative eye disorder that would leave him blind by the age of thirteen. But Erik was determined to rise above this devastating disability and lead a fulfilling and exciting life.
In this poignant and inspiring memoir, he shares his struggle to push past the limits imposed on him by his visual impairment-and by a seeing world. He speaks movingly of the role his family played in his battle to break through the barriers of blindness: the mother who prayed for the miracle that would restore her son's sight and the father who encouraged him to strive for that distant mountaintop. And he tells the story of his dream to climb the world's Seven Summits, and how he is turning that dream into astonishing reality (something fewer than a hundred mountaineers have done).
From the snow-capped summit of McKinley to the towering peaks of Aconcagua and Kilimanjaro to the ultimate challenge, Mount Everest, this is a story about daring to dream in the face of impossible odds. It is about finding the courage to reach for that ultimate summit, and transforming your life into something truly miraculous.
"I admire you immensely. You are an inspiration to other blind people and plenty of folks who can see just fine." (Jon Krakauer, author of
Into Thin Air)
"A vivid and compelling book." (Time magazine)
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Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness
by John M. Hull
Shortly after John Hull went blind, after years of struggling with failing vision, he had a dream in which he was trapped on a sinking ship, submerging into another, unimaginable world. The power of this calmly eloquent, intensely perceptive memoir lies in its thorough navigation of the world of blindness -- a world in which stairs are safe and snow is frightening, where food and sex lose much of their allure and playing with one's child may be agonizingly difficult. As he describes the ways in which blindness shapes his experience of his wife and children, of strangers helpful and hostile, and, above all, of his God, Hull becomes a witness in the highest, true sense. Touching the Rock is a book that will instruct, move, and profoundly transform anyone who reads it.
"John Hull goes a long way toward taking us with him through his descent into total blindness...He lets us see with no trace of self-pity or self-praise how blindness has become far him a genuine acquisition, an unforeseeably rich gift that has made of him what so few of us are: excellent watchers and hearers of the world...triumphant in the teeth of ruin". -- Reynolds Price
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Planet of the Blind
by Stephen Kuusisto
"The sensorium of the blind who possess some marginal vision is by turns magical and disturbing," writes poet and educator Stephen Kuusisto. "My eyes dance in a private, rising field of silver threads, teeming greens, roses, and smoke." This is the record of a handicapped life, but it is also an extraordinary literary achievement. Stephen Kuusisto has been legally blind since birth, and in this stunning memoir he has succeeded in translating his opaque, kaleidoscopic world of shape and color into poetic and luminous prose.
Brought up to disavow his blindness, Kuusisto spent much of his life trying to pass as a sighted man, traveling everywhere at dizzying speeds without a cane. Still, he writes, he remained ashamed of his "blind self." As a child with bottle-lens glasses, he was ridiculed by his classmates; as an adolescent he struggled first with obesity, then anorexia; as a young adult, in love with reading, he suffered the derision of teachers who felt he could not possibly keep up with his studies. Fueled by his passion for the written word, Kuusisto nonetheless persisted, successfully, in conquering academia--until a devastating accident forced him to acquire the white cane at last. Almost immediately the cane became his "divining rod," but it was only a matter of time before he felt the need for a more powerful ally. Enter Corky, a two-year-old yellow Labrador retriever who became his guiding eyes and changed his life forever.
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Sight Unseen
by Georgina Kleege
This elegantly written book offers an unexpected and unprecedented perspective on blindness and sight. Georgina Kleege describes first-hand the daily experience of visual impairment and how it has affected not only her view of the world but also the world`s view of her. She considers a wide range of issues that affect the blind, including stereotypes in fiction and film, education, and social status.
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My Friend, You Are Legally Blind - A Writer's Struggle with Macular Degeneration
by Charles Champlin
In "these random notes" about his years with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), Champlin, a Los Angeles Times critic and columnist for several decades, reports the disease's sudden onset and records the ensuing changes in his life and work as well as the heightened importance of his human relationships, especially that with his wife, Peg, a librarian and historian, who became his driver, researcher, primary support, and guide. Touch-typing, which he had learned in high school, also became more important than ever. The cause of AMD is not yet known, and there is no cure for it, though current research may prove valuable. Observing that "the greatest enjoyment and consolation of limited vision is unlimited listening," Champlin is optimistic. He includes much helpful material about various instruments and aids for the partially sighted, increasing the book's value to libraries, which should also obtain D'Amato and Snyder's Macular Degeneration, with its greater amount of current scientific information and its brief accounts by other AMD patients.
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Amazing Grace: Autobiography of a Survivor
by Grace Halloran
This is the true story of Grace Halloran, a survivor, a person who gets things done against all odds. She tells how she, a blind mother, raised her son. She recounts the step-by-step process of intuition and serendipity that led to her developing unorthodox therapies which finally reversed her irreversible disease and reversed it in others, as well! What? The official scientific/medical commuity was incensed. How dare she!
She tells about her growing reputation. She gave classes. People from all over the world came to her, and she went all over the world. Her stories of helping people to see again are poignant. One thing is clear: she loves these people. She cares, and passionately.
But when she founded the Center for Eye Health Education in northern California, that was too much for the scientific/medical community. Who did this woman think she was? Reversing the irreversible! Political pressure led to the cancellation of the $100,000 grant from the State of California. The Center folded. But Grace didn't.
Amazing Grace is the powerful story of one woman's courage and fierce determination to save her son and herself from blindness. Full of fun and gritty reality, it is an inspiring account of what determination in the face of overwhelming odds can do. It is also a story of personal triumph over helter-skelter beginnings, even to the final pages, when Grace discovers what happened to the daughter who was wrested from her and put up for adoption over twenty years before.
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Slackjaw
by Jim Knipfel
Who would have thought a memoir about going blind and suffering from severe depression could be so funny? From the opening scene, when an uncle who has the same degenerative eye disease warns 12-year-old Jim, "You better start learning Braille now," Knipfel defies all the conventional responses to adversity. You can't help but laugh when a doctor "who had obviously been playing hooky when they were teaching sensitivity in medical school" tells a wailing woman who has just learned her son is dying, "Please sit down... [he] has a good two or three weeks yet." The hard-edged humor comes naturally to a guy who as a grad student formed a band called the Pain Amplifiers; we're not exactly surprised to learn that his column for an alternative newspaper prompted hate mail as well as fan letters. Knipfel's complete lack of self-pity conveys the particulars of failing vision with blunt immediacy (he wears a wide-brimmed hat so he'll feel impending lampposts before he knocks himself senseless against them). His zest for the world's absurdities makes this book an exhilarating guide to "the weirdness parade I have been marching in my whole life."
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