TOUCHING THE ROCK An Experience of Blindness

An intensely personal exploration of blindness reveals a world of sound and echo, of people without faces, of the strange relationship between waking and dreaming, and of new perceptions of nature, personality, and human experience

Between 1983 and 1986, the author, a professor of religious education in the British midlands, recorded his experiences as a newly blind person: his remarriage, his final eye operation, the births of his three children, his thoughts about his work and personal relationships. We learn of Hull's need to carve out "a world into which the sighted cannot penetrate, a place where some kind of inner control can be established." As we follow the author through public events and social engagements, feel his embarrassments and depressions, experience his struggle adapting to blindness, we discern much about the quest for a unified life. Hull's unsentimental memoir has no resolution, "no particular ending, because blindness has no ending."
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In 1983, Hull, a university lecturer who had lived with sight problems from the age of 13, found that the dark discs he had fought for 36 years had finally overwhelmed his sight. The spiritual and emotional reactions to his vision loss form the basis of this poignant memoir, and the many questions he asks contribute to his eventual acceptance of his fate. A richly textured dream life adds to his exploration of the "other world" of blindness, and the understanding and meaning he finds coalesce into a powerful work. For those seeking practical solutions and strategies to cope with visual impairment, Margaret M. Smith's If Blindness Strikes, Don't Strike Out (Charles C. Thomas, 1984) provides a storehouse of information. Recommended for consumer health collections.
- Janet M. Coggan, Univ. of Florida Lib., Gainesville
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.