Life Unseen

Written with wit, warmth and razor-sharp insight, this book should be essential reading for anyone with an interest in blindness, history, society, culture and beyond. -- Anna Bonet * Non-fiction book of the month, The i * Informative, heartfelt … This admirable book dispels myths around the condition. -- Martin Chilton * The Independent * Spirited, irreverent … Life Unseen offers an illuminating peek into one woman’s world, and asks searching questions of us all in terms of the different ways in which we perceive our world. There are no glib answers because blindness, as Life Unseen demonstrates, is a subject riven with ambiguity and complexity. In this important and hugely enjoyable book, Mills clears away some of the myths and injustices that surround it. -- Susan Flockhart * The Herald * It’s an extraordinary account of blindness, the mythology that surrounds it, the fallacies and taboos connected to it, and the attitudes towards it throughout the ages. Written by an author who is herself blind, it’s filled with fascinating information, practical insights and teaching moments about the nature of imagination, language and perception of our world. -- Joanne Harris * The Guardian * Selina Mills’s defiant book is a thundering challenge to our sighted notions of blindness, a resounding battle cry for a revolution in our age-old perceptions of being blind that should be read by sighted people everywhere. -- Wendy Moore * Times Literary Supplement * A beautiful, tender and inspiring book about seeing the world in a different way. * Peter Frankopan * Spirited … [A] powerful memoir-cum-manifesto. -- Ysenda Maxtone Graham * The Spectator * A powerful and erudite social history of blindness in the Western world interwoven with an extraordinarily moving but unsentimental account of her own gradual life-long descent into blindness. -- Julia Hamilton * The Catholic Herald * A much-needed and powerful examination of what it is to be blind. -- Simon Evans * Choice * Selina Mills de-mystifies blindness both in its material reality as well as its manifold superstitions. That she does this with wit and intelligence makes this a superb and memorable read. * Stephen Kuusisto, Syracuse University, USA * An original, well-researched work that provides superb insight into the world of people with visual impairment. * Hektoen International * 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 * Selina Mills crafts a compelling narrative that illuminates and animates the story of a community that has always existed but has been relegated to the margins and the shadows. Mills takes readers along on her personal journey as she comes to terms with her own blindness with candor and warmth. She shares her fears, her irritation, her rage, and yes, her joy, as her contemporary story resonates with the lives of famous and lesser known blind writers, musicians, inventors and leaders from the past and present. This book will help to reform the image of blindness from a tragedy that must be overcome to simply another facet of human diversity. * Georgina Kleege, University of California, Berkely, USA * The metanarrative of blindness hangs over us all, invites us to identify as sighted or blind, and thus to follow numerous binary assumptions that pertain to everything from sexuality to epistemology. Life Unseen helps to disrupt the myths, tropes, and stereotypes of the metanarrative via the often under-rated power of memoire. As such, the book makes an important contribution to blindness studies. * David Bolt, Professor of Disability Studies and Interdisciplinarity at Liverpool Hope University * This is a wonderfully refreshing account of blindness. With a winning mix of wit and erudition, Mills cuts through the stereotypes and clichés of blindness to give us a funny, touching and memorable account of her quest to understand why blindness gets such a bad press. Part history, part memoir, Mills’s writing takes us through an alternative history of blindness whilst reflecting with honesty and beauty on her personal journey into sight loss. A significant contribution to the field of critical blindness studies. * Hannah Thompson, Royal Holloway University of London, UK * Selina Mills achieves that finest of balances in Life Unseen, to discuss important intellectual and social issues in an entertaining and occasionally light-hearted way. Through an examination of topics such as schooling, a love of reading and writing and the popular need to cure blindness, Mills examines trends both current and historical, providing a very real experience of the cultural concept of blindness and what it is to be a blind person. * Simon Hayhoe, University of Bath, UK * I have been waiting, and hoping, for a book like this one. In Life Unseen, Selina Mills engages the myths and realities of blindness in ways that are both deeply researched and powerfully personal. Challenging stereotypes that have accrued over centuries, honoring the experiences of blind people past and present, Mills offers us a cultural history of blindness that is welcoming, whip smart, and surprisingly witty. This is a must read, and a very pleasurable read, for anyone interested in what blindness means and why blindness matters. * Vanessa Warne, University of Manitoba, Canada * This is a deeply personal and remarkably courageous book, exploring historical and literary constructions of blindness as manifestations of heroism or tragedy which set blind people apart from society as distinctly ‘others’. It argues convincingly that such stereotypes should be aside so that blind people can voice their own diverse experiences as ordinary human beings. * Anna Sapir Abulafia, Oxford University, UK *