Publisher's Synopsis
What is it like to be blind-or nearly blind? In this enchanting, quirky memoir, Selina Mills leads us through her life among the curious, pitying, and well-wishing sighted. Anecdotes from myth, religion, literature, and medicine reveal the blind as devil, prophet, victim, genius, exhibit, disabled-and clown. The book's cheerful revelation is that the blind are 'ordinary', that darkness is not all dark. ― Janet Todd
Imagine a world without sight. Is it dark and gloomy? Is it terrifying and isolating? Or is it simply a state of not seeing, which we have demonised and sentimentalized over the centuries? And why is blindness so frightening?
In this fascinating historical adventure, broadcaster and author Selina Mills takes us on a journey through the history of blindness in Western Culture to discover that blindness is not so dark after all.
Inspired by her own experience of losing her sight as she forged a successful journalistic career, Life Unseen takes us through a personal and unsentimental historical quest through the lives, stories and achievements of blind people - as well as those sighted people who sought to patronise, demonise and fix them. From the blind poet Homer, through the myths and moralising of early medieval culture to the scientific and medical discoveries of the Enlightenment and modern times, the story of blindness turns out to be a story of our whole culture.
