lightreads

Nonfiction. Reflection and autobiography from a woman who lost her sight in adulthood. This book Is interesting pretty much only as a typification of that vast, unbridged divide in the blind community between those congenitally blind from birth or early childhood, and those who lose their sight much later. Wagner's day-to-day life looks an awful lot like mine, and I grinned in recognition through some of her rueful reflections of more spectacular stumbles (note: do not trash someone until you are positive they are not in the room with you). But we just think differently, in a global sense. Wagner thinks
like a sighted person who has suffered a tragic loss, and I think like a blind person, and that's as well as I can characterize it. She's okay with forms of patronization and coddling that set my teeth on edge because they "make me feel safer," and I nearly tossed the Bookport across the room when she explained how horrible she finds all these "accommodation lawsuits" because "you don't make friends by suing people. Um no, no you don't, but since when do I want
to make friends with the apartment manager who refuses to rent to me because of my dog? Yes, yes, I know, she doubtless feels alienated by the blind and sighted communities alike now, and she doesn't understand us as stubbornly as we don't understand her, but I'm right and you're wrong so there neener neener.