Planet of the Blind

Planet of the Blind
by Stephen Kuusisto

Planet of the Blind
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Book Summary Information

Author: Stephen Kuusisto
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-03-18
ISBN: 0571196969
Number of pages: 200
Publisher: Faber & Faber

Book Reviews of Planet of the Blind

Book Review: Striking prose
Summary: 5 Stars

When I picked up this book, I was expecting an autobiography, a memoir of a blind person. I've always wondered how a blind person "sees" the world, so I was curious to read the book. What I got was something much more than a non-fictional account. The prose is absolutely striking, poetic, full of rich vivid metaphors. It inspired tears, and laughter, and rage, and awe in me at different points in the book.

This book is more than a non-fictional autobiography. It's a work of high literature. You will be enriched after having read it.

Summary of Planet of the Blind

Stephen Kuusisto, an American, has been almost completely blind since a post-natal operation severely damaged his retinas. In this autobiography he tells of the years of lonely childhood spent behind bottle-lens glasses, the struggle through high school and college, and first love and sex. Derided by classmates, his parents pretending that nothing was wrong, he stumbled through life enraged and mortified. Only when a five-year-old labrador entered his life did he begin to trust, and learn to "walk upright".
"In the country of the blind," the old adage asserts, "the one-eyed man is king." But in Stephen Kuusisto's superb new memoir, The Planet of the Blind, the world of a one-eyed man is a kingdom of confusion and quixotic struggle. Born with only residual vision, one eye capable of 20/200 vision and the other unseeing, Kuusisto was led by the insistence of his mother and the ignorance of the society around him to an elaborate and harrowing attempt to appear sighted. At times the effort was life-threatening, as with the bicycle he rode from the ages of 10 to 30 ("Were my years of cycling an actuarial gift?" he wonders), and at other times profoundly humiliating, as when his stumblings and collisions are assumed to be signs of habitual drunkenness. Indeed, the almost inconceivable effort of maintaining his sighted masquerade leads to all sorts of self-destructive behavior, from obesity to anorexia, from booze and cigarettes to drugs and perilous clambers up fire escapes.

Most biography is a recounting of struggle that leads to success and achievement, but Kuusisto's story is of a lifelong struggle that leads to acceptance. For this gifted poet, the barely glimpsed visual world is an irresistible temptation, despite pain, embarrassment, and failure. When he finally submits to the white cane and a guide dog, suddenly he can envision a "Planet of the Blind," a place where those without sight live in peace with their own lives, where "everyone is free to touch faces, paintings, gardens," a place where beauty is behind the eye of the beholder. --John Longenbaugh

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