American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults
Future Reflections Winter 2024 REVIEWS
by Andrew Leland
Reviewed by Deborah Kendrick
From the Editor: Deborah Kendrick is a freelance journalist whose columns have appeared in newspapers and magazines throughout the United States. She has written several books pertaining to blindness, including Navigating Healthcare When All They Can See Is that You Can't. She serves on the board of directors of the NFB of Ohio.
The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight
by Andrew Leland
Penguin Random House
ISBN: 9781984881434, 368 pages
Available in alternative formats from Bookshare and NLS BARD
News of Andrew Leland's book flooded my inbox for weeks before its actual release. A journalist and podcaster with a reputable track record (and let's not forget that he just happens to be Neil Simon's grandson) was publishing a memoir with a title borrowed from a 1904 short story by H. G. Wells: “The Country of the Blind.” I couldn't wait to read it. And I vowed not to read it. Those conflicting emotions prevailed after my first read of the book, and this review is my attempt to understand the ambivalence.
Andrew Leland is a fine writer. His prose is snappy, smart, and, occasionally, borderline brilliant. A few lines reverberate again and again—haunting, hovering, raw, and real. But something is off-key here, and I keep scrabbling among my responses to sort out where or why the tone rings less true.
Let's start with the title. It's sort of like three titles in one. The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight.
First, there's The Country of the Blind, Leland's remake of the 1904 science fiction story. Then there's the memoir (the best part of the book, to my taste) in which we meet some major characters in Leland's life story. Finally, we come to the chronicling of the end of sight.
In the H. G. Wells story, Nuñez is a sighted traveler who tumbles down a mountain into a valley populated entirely by people without sight. He tries to join the tribe and has a narrow escape. (Sorry for the spoiler; I recommend that you read the story for yourself.) Like Nuñez, Leland is a visitor to the country of the blind, sometimes claiming his citizenship as one heading toward blindness, but acknowledging that he may never get there. As our tour guide, he chronicles the history of blindness and disability rights. All of the right components are there—the stigma, status as beggar, Louis Braille and the emergence of education followed by literacy. He includes the fact that disabled people were the first to be murdered in the Holocaust, and he reports on some of the inventions enjoyed throughout the world that were initially designed for or by blind people. He covers the disability rights milestones of the last century—including the formation of the National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind, the ground-breaking work of the Rolling Quads in Berkeley, and the 1977 takeover by disability-rights activists that led to the signing of the Section 504 regulations to the Rehabilitation Act. He introduces many of the primary individuals who were contributors to the civil rights and culture enjoyed by twenty-first-century blind people.
If you aren't familiar with these stories, this book is a great place to learn. Leland hits the high points, and he tells the tales admirably well. I knew many of the major players, I have written about the events and discoveries myself, and I was more than pleased to read Leland's accurate and intelligent recounting. For some, these passages might be tedious. For me, they were a welcome, familiar song, one with which I was happy to sing along. Leland also does an admirable job of summarizing the key blind players in literature (Oedipus, Tiresias, King Lear) and writers from Homer to John Hull.
As he explores the world and culture of blindness, Leland attends an NFB chapter meeting. But he hovers outside the circle, observing and admittedly uncomfortable. Later, though, he engages in conversation with a number of blind people, and he clearly considers them peers. He presents them with warmth, respect, and admiration.
The best parts of the book are the memoir elements, where we meet Leland's wife Lily and his little boy Oscar. I fell in love with both of them right along with Andrew. While the true memoir elements are the best of the narrative, the most skippable segments are the science lessons on eyesight, eye diseases, and Leland's end of sight that is not ending.
How can a guy "going blind" tell people what it's like to be blind? And how much traction do we gain as blind people, always considered "one-down" on the social hierarchy, when our story is told by this guy who can see people's facial expressions as he walks down the street with his white cane?
As a reader who mastered this blindness stuff in childhood, I found myself screeching at the author with parental impatience. When his knife on the cutting board disappears, leaving only the radish behind, his palpable panic strikes me as ridiculous. "Just put your hand on the damn board!" I want to tell him. "Use your sense of touch!" Oddly, he never mentions getting around to that epiphany on his own.
Leland refers to the slowed pace of blindness as though it is a given that all blind people will walk more slowly than their sighted counterparts, definitely a wrong-headed assumption. He refers to his stumbling over the collection of products Lily leaves on the bathtub as though this annoyance would be recognized by all blind people as a universal affront.
His descriptions, on the other hand, of some one-down moments universal to the experience of blind people are stunningly on-point. Standing in a Starbucks line with his white cane in hand, he describes the sudden sensation of hands on his shoulders, moving him out of another's path. "Strangers, I'm learning, frequently touch and guide blind people like this in public, without warning or consent, feeling the need to manage us like furniture ..." This passage represents one of the moments when Leland gets the notes right, is on key, sings like one of us.
The author spends three days at an NFB National Convention and two weeks at the Colorado Center for the Blind. He attends as a journalist, but as a journalist trying on the experience of blindness to see how it fits.
The most memorable passage in the book for me, possibly because I recognized my own stance in his description and have never heard it referenced at all, was his description of the pose taken by blind travelers which he dubs "Addressing the Void." In the vast convention hall during General Sessions, he observes people working out their locations like this:
"The expression on the face of a blind gazer paused in the world takes on an inwardly whirring, computational, deep-listening aspect. After a few moments posed in frozen, careful attention, this person would announce, firmly and loudly (to whisper was futile; whoever responded would need to both hear them and realize they were being spoken to), "IS THIS NORTH DAKOTA?" Because the hall was so dense with people, this approach usually worked. "Nebraska!" someone cheerfully replied, her own gaze aimed past the questioner. "Keep going!"
While this is spot-on accurate reporting and fascinating in its own way, it also felt a bit disturbing. Leland is reporting, after all, but it feels somehow voyeuristic and violating. Of course, all of us, whether we see with our eyes or not, run the risk of being scrutinized by others every day, but there is a twinge of discomfort in reading how this maybe-blind-one-day observer evaluated this alternative technique.
To balance that discomfort, however, is the relief I felt at reading his take on the dressed-up banquet crowd. He sits in the lobby, watching convention attendees streaming toward the banquet hall, again observing as journalist until he finally takes a seat himself at one of the tables. He pokes fun at himself for asking the question, Why do blind people need to look nice if they can't see? But then, with the sound of the other shoe dropping, he concedes that "people did look fantastic coming out of the elevators."
Happily, unlike Nuñez, Andrew Leland does not leave the country of the blind as an escapee or believe that he is a better human than its inhabitants. With each chapter and each tiny diminishment of his vision, we feel him becoming increasingly aware that things might be okay in this other country, even if he is not eager to go there. While he can write that blindness is not about pity and charity, he does seem to feel sorry for himself at times. But then, why should we expect that all of us will respond to blindness in the same way? When he sees his diagnosis as tragic, is that coming from the retinitis pigmentosa, the inherited tendency toward hypochondria that he acknowledges having received from his famous playwright grandfather, or something else entirely?
Some of us know intuitively how to play any melody we hear on the piano, while others can play only by studying the written musical score. As with music, some of us arguably take to the alternative techniques of blindness more comfortably than others, enjoying a more natural inclination to use work-around techniques. And why shouldn't it be exactly that way? We all know by now that some humans learn visually, others aurally, and still others with a lovely potpourri of sensory approaches. When describing firsthand experiences, Andrew Leland comes only intellectually, not intuitively, to the alternate techniques of blindness. In his pursuit to explore those alternatives, however, he has developed a quality guidebook of sorts for others interested or obliged to become travelers.
By book's end, Leland does indeed seem to recognize viscerally that there is gain and beauty to be found in both the worlds of blindness and sightedness (or blindlessness.) He appreciates and revels in the gift of sight, and I hope he gets to enjoy it for many decades to come. If he writes another book, a true memoir, he could begin it exactly where this one stops—with the realization that love, the love of a spouse, a child, or life itself, feels the same with or without sight.