American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults
Future Reflections Special Issue on Technology REVIEW
by Joshua A. Miele with Wendell Jamieson
Reviewed by Deborah Kendrick
From the Editor: Deborah Kendrick is a nationally recognized columnist, and the author of several books related to blindness and disability. Her most recent title is When Your Ears Can’t Help You See, published by National Braille Press.
Connecting Dots: A Blind Life
by Joshua A. Miele with Wendell Jamieson
Grand Central Publishing/Hachette
304 pages
ISBN: 978-0306832789
Available from Bookshare and from National Library Service as DB127356
It borders on schmaltz to put this into writing, but this book is a glorious opportunity to celebrate one of our own. Joshua Miele is the genuine article, the real deal, a blind person’s blind person. He’s not just okay with being blind; he’s proud of it! His life’s mission is to share his every notion for making the blind life better with every blind person who will listen. If you are blind or if you have a blind child, your experiences will not be the same as Joshua Miele’s. Yet this MacArthur genius is so comfortable in his own skin that chord after chord will ring true as you turn the pages. He is one of us; we are all connected.
An outsider might comment that to say Miele is “comfortable in his own skin” is the irony of ironies. His skin is far from ordinary. In the book’s opening pages Miele recounts the horrific crime that turned the world of an ordinary middle-class Brooklyn family on its head and became a cautionary tale for children far and wide. The story was so compelling that, forty years later, it prompted a New York Times reporter to track down that little kid who was burned and blinded in an instant and write a follow-up story.
On an ordinary day in 1973 a four-year-old child opened a gate to a known neighbor and was blinded and severely burned in an instant. The reader is pulled into the moment. With his mother, we see the child’s face smoking. We hear the screams, feel the pain, and grow weary of the smells and sounds of the hospital, right along with four-year-old Josh, who will never look the same or see the same again.
Dr. Joshua Miele’s life has been fast-paced, frenetic, and brilliant, and his book whisks the reader from one dramatic phase to the next. He grows from a precocious, often reckless small child to a briefly drug-addicted teen. We celebrate with him as he falls in love for the first time, forms a band, and learns about the mystical, amazing award called a MacArthur Fellowship. We applaud him as he learns to dismantle a transistor radio and roller-skates through his neighborhood by capitalizing on the echoes his metal skates produce on the pavement. He finds ways to manipulate situations and relationships for more adventure with his personal magic wand, the landline telephone.
When he heads off to UC Berkeley, he finally meets his “tribe,” a cohort of other smart, curious blind people. His story will trigger a resounding aha moment for many blind readers, who will recall times when they owned or disowned their fellow travelers with disabilities.
Entertaining and enlightening by turns, Connecting Dots is a book to read straight through for the sheer pleasure. A tone of amused irreverence permeates many of the moments Miele recounts, from his story of using bad words that shocked his kindergarten teacher to the accidental fate of a prosthetic eye, now drifting somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Joshua Miele is someone who is perfectly comfortable being himself.
From the time a family friend was honored with a MacArthur Fellowship, Joshua Miele became intrigued by the MacArthur Foundation. His fascination was reignited when he received a call from a MacArthur representative, expressing interest in him in 2014. We celebrate with him when he is actually awarded the coveted prize in 2021.
To people on the streets of Berkeley, or anywhere else where he has been introduced, Dr. Joshua Miele is that blind guy with a burned face and a white cane. In reality, he is a thinker, a scientist, an accessibility researcher, a husband and father and the recipient of a MacArthur Award. Whether you know Josh Miele or not, you will enjoy reading this book. For parents of blind children, his story can serve as a roadmap for how a blind child can come to embrace the blind life. Josh Miele embraces that life. Enmeshed in that life, he has found countless paths to ideas that benefit blind people everywhere. He concludes that he is lucky. After reading this book, we know we are all lucky to have him in this world.