South African Library for the Blind Book Reviews for October

Title: Smart medicine for your eyes: A Guide to natural, effective, and safe relief of common eye disorder.
Author: DR. Jeffrey Anshel
Format: Available in braille.

Review: The book is designed for everyone who wants to take an active part in their eye care, Smart Medicine for Your Eyes is an A-to-Z guide to eye disorders and their conventional and alternative treatments. It provides an overview of eye function and introduces treatment methods, it also offers a comprehensive directory to eye disorders and their therapy options, and also guides you in using the recommended procedures. Here is a reliable source of information that you will turn to time and again.


Title: Eye know: keeping your eyes precious.
Author: Martin Oguzie
Format: Braille

Review: If you are blind or have a family member or friend who is blind, this book is for you. If you are losing your sight or know someone who is, this book is for you. If you are a teacher, social worker, minister, librarian or counsellor, this book is for you. It is meant to provide information on where to get things and how to learn new techniques. Even more important it is meant to put confidence to a person’s life and allay fear.

Title: Blind
Author: Rachel DeWoskin
Format: Coming soon in audio and braille.

Review: A powerful story about blindness from an award-winning author.
When Emma Sasha Silver loses her eyesight in a nightmare accident, she must relearn everything from walking across the street to recognizing her own sisters to imagining colours. One of seven children, Emma used to be the invisible kid, but now it seems everyone is watching her. And just as she’s about to start high school and try to recover her friendships and former life, one of her classmates is found dead in an apparent suicide. Fifteen and blind, Emma has to untangle what happened and why—in order to see for herself what makes life worth living. Rachel DeWoskin’s brilliant Blind is one of those rare books that utterly absorbs the reader into the life and experience of another.


Title: Touching the rock: An Experience of blindness
Author: John M. Hull
Format: Available in both Audio and Braille

Review: 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.


Title: The two-in-one: walking with Smokie, walking with blindness
Author: Rod Michalko
Format: Available in braille

Review: Michalko, a sociologist, has written an insightful memoir of how, with the aid of his guide dog, Smokie, he came to fully inhabit his blindness. …Michalko presents himself on many levels: the scientist considering the meanings of social behaviour toward disability; the attentive pet-caretaker describing guide dog training and funny incidents that occur during his walks with Smokie; and finally, a down-to-earth intellectual who begins to forget-after decades of near-sightlessness-that he has a disability. He writes movingly about how, through his relationship with Smokie, he came to view blindness not just as a lack of sight but as something in itself, a condition with its own properties. In so doing, he invites us to rethink the very nature of disability.”-Publishers Weekly “This is a moving phenomenology of blindness, a provocative deconstruction of the culture/nature dichotomy, a telling analysis of the everyday construction of identity, and a compelling argument for the special ‘insight’ of marginality of various kinds.”-Spencer E. Cahill, University of South Florida “The Two in One offers a fresh look at disability in western culture by reconsidering our traditional views about the human-animal bond. Along the way, Rod Michalko shows us how both he and guide dog Smokie learn to scan the far horizon.”-Stephen Kuusisto, author of Planet of the Blind.