After reading Andrew Leland’s memoir, The Country of the Blind, you will look at the English language differently ... His own prose is jazzy and intelligent: loaded with statistics and studies in some places, lyrical elsewhere, with licks of understated humor ... Far from a feel-good family chronicle. Leland rigorously explores the disability’s most troubling corners ... A wonderful cross-disciplinary wander. If on occasion its deluge of information overwhelms, this is where one reviewer’s old cliché about eyes glazing over enters everlasting retirement.
Andrew Leland’s memoir about this process articulates beautifully, with energy and honesty, how being held between seeing and blindness has changed him and his views on our ableist world ... Though Leland is accused occasionally by friends of 'over-intellectualising' his situation, his fine sensibility, lucid writing and dignified treatment of his subject feels anything but indulgent. This book invites us all to rethink what it means to desire, to read, to be independent, to sit with uncertainty and to assume a new identity. Leland models how we might accept inevitable changes in our faculties as we age with tempered apprehension, humour and interest.
A fluid, thoughtful writer, Leland finds plenty of fascinating insights during these journeys ... A book about identity ... As a writer, Leland is more cerebral than sensual, so it’s frustrating when his ability to fully examine his experiences and ideas feels a bit hemmed in by this fear of stepping out of line. The sweet spots in The Country of the Blind—and there are lots of them—come when his efforts to comprehend something intellectually tips him over into unexpected emotion ... Full of riches where he had anticipated only deprivation, and with plenty of corners yet to be explored.
