As Godin wonderfully shows, we’ve come a long way in our quest to understand what blindness means.
How blindness has shaped global culture across centuries.
Playwright and columnist Godin approaches her subject from a unique perspective. Now blind, she gradually lost her sight from retinal dystrophy, a frightening process she poignantly recounts throughout the book. Her ambitious goal is to trace the “complexities of metaphorical and literal blindness and sight.” As she writes, “what I’m wrestling with…is the concept of blindness that our ocularcentric culture extols on the one hand and dismisses on the other.” The idea that poetic gifts are compensation for blindness began with Homer, who may or may not have been blind. Godin uncovers a rich literary history of blindness, including such signposts as the blind bard Demodocus, biblical Scripture, King Lear, Jorge Luis Borges, Mark Danielewski’s “haunting masterpiece,” House of Leaves, and Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under. John Milton, whose Paradise Lost provides the book’s title, went blind in his 40s, composing his later works in his head until an amanuensis wrote them down. Godin discusses Milton’s blindness and the “long tradition in Milton scholarship that falls victim to…ocularcentrism.” The author also introduces us to Valentin Haüy, who opened Paris’ groundbreaking Royal Institute for Blind Youth in 1785 and developed a way of reading via embossed letters on paper. A young Louis Braille attended the school and would go on to “invent a writing system that would eventually revolutionize blind education.” After World War II, a veteran-rehabilitation specialist “pioneered the technique” for using a long, sweeping white cane. After a sprightly look at Helen Keller in vaudeville and Godin’s play about it, she moves on to the topic of blindness and sex and the difficulties that face blind authors, artists, and musicians, including Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles. The author wraps up her erudite, capacious book with discussions of blind parents and superheroes, the portrayal of the blind in the media, and blind pride.
As Godin wonderfully shows, we’ve come a long way in our quest to understand what blindness means.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4871-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
A fascinating and funny look at the life of a famous actor who found further fulfillment through giving back.
The actor discusses his career on the stage and in film, and his life focusing on the value of art and public service.
Now 66, Stern, perhaps best known for his roles in Home Alone and City Slickers, is no longer "the precocious teenager who moved to New York as a seventeen-year-old, at least ten years younger than all of my friends, the youngest dad at all my kids’ school events.” As he discusses his childhood in Maryland, his introduction to the theater, and writing a musical version of Lord of the Flies, the author's love of the work shows through on every page—as does his family’s legacy of a strong work ethic (his mother told him, “I don’t care what you do but you are out of this house when you turn eighteen”). Realizing that “academics were not going to get me anywhere,” he committed to acting. After some early stage work, he began working in films, appearing in a number of critically successful projects in the late 1970s and early ’80s, including Breaking Away and Diner. Stern analyzes key moments in the development of his craft, as well as the twists and turns of a very public life, which included work with the USO and the experience of being sued for $25 million over a TV show. Although readers may pick up the book to learn more about Hollywood, his focus on his work-life balance brings some of the most memorable passages, from his narration and directing work in the TV series The Wonder Years (which included no on-screen billing), which helped him overcome his childhood dyslexia, to his experience working with the Boys & Girls Club and his lifelong focus on public service.
A fascinating and funny look at the life of a famous actor who found further fulfillment through giving back.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781632280930
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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