Sight Unseen

What would it feel like to know you are going blind? Thirteen-year-old Finn loves bike riding -- the more dangerous the trail, the better. But he had a spectacular crash a few months ago, and he's just received a diagnosis that will change his life. He is slowly going blind. In a few years his vision will be gone. Desperate to salvage something of his "last" summer, Finn invites a friend to the cottage and is drawn to a strange island that seems to glimmer -- but no one else can see it. When he gets close, he's sucked into something he could never have anticipated. Can Finn's friend Cheese help him come to terms with "lights out" . . . or will it take something much more extraordinary?

Vision, more than any other sense, dominates our mental life. Our visual experience is just so rich, so detailed, that we can hardly distinguish that experience from the world itself. Even when we just think about the world and don't look at it directly, we can't help but 'imagine' what it looks like. We think of 'seeing' as being a conscious activity--we direct our eyes, we choose what we look at, we register what we are seeing. The series of events described in this book radically altered this attitude towards vision. This book describes one of the most extraordinary neurological cases of recent years--one that profoundly changed scientific views on consciousness. It is the story of Dee Fletcher--a woman recently blinded--who became the subject of a series of scientific studies. As events unfolded, Milner and Goodale found that Dee wasn't in fact blind--she just didn't know that she could see. Taking us on a journey into the unconscious brain, the two scientists who made this incredible discovery tell the amazing story of their work, and the surprising conclusion they were forced to reach. Written to be accessible to students and popular science readers, this book is a fascinating illustration of the power of the 'unconscious' mind.

She was safe in a world of darkness. Now danger threatens in the cold light of day... Before the experimental surgery that gave her sight, Kendra Michaels developed her other senses to an amazing capacity. Now she can identify a Nissan by the sound of its engine, a Norelco electric razor by the pattern of stubble it leaves behind, or an obscure colorless fire accelerant by its sweet smell. Law enforcement agencies clamor for her rare powers of perception and observation, too often disrupting the life she has built helping others through music therapy. Because so very often, only Kendra can get the job done. But in this case, it's Kendra who first realizes that the apparent traffic accident on San Diego's historic Cabrillo Bridge is in fact a murder scene, and she rushes to alert the police before crucial evidence is destroyed. As the body count rises and one murder unveils another, a gruesome pattern emerges. Someone is killing people in ways that mirror Kendra's most notorious cases. She has a fan: someone who admires her work and is twisted enough to show that admiration through murder--while naming himself after the biggest art forger of the 20th century. He views himself not as a monster but as an artist. And he is not working alone. In Iris Johansen's New York Times bestseller, Sight Unseen, as the darkness closes in, near enough to touch Kendra and those she loves, Kendra must come face to face with her greatest fears--and her most ruthless enemy. A man who moves through the shadows, a man she may even know, who hides behind the mask of sanity, sight unseen.

Blind neuro-physicist Frank Byron's experiments, based on the visual and auditory processing of his seeing-eye dog, have given him the ability to see and hear spirits. Unfortunately for Frank, his newfound technological ability has thrust him into the heart of unfathomable evil. --Book jacket.

Describes what it is like to be blind, or to be thought of as blind by sighted society, discusses how blindness has been portrayed in literature and film, and recounts the author's experiences adjusting to macular degeneration, learning braille, and coping with the inability to establish eye contact

Sight Unseen reveals the cultural and biological realities of race, gender, and sexual orientation from the perspective of the blind. Through ten case studies and dozens of interviews, Ellyn Kaschak taps directly into the phenomenology of race, gender, and sexual orientation among blind individuals, along with the everyday epistemology of vision. Kaschak's work reveals not only how the blind create systems of meaning out of cultural norms but also how cultural norms inform our conscious and unconscious interactions with others regardless of our physical ability to see.

"Based on Star Trek and Star Trek: the next generation created by Gene Roddenberry."

"A compelling and challenging work."—Frances K. Pohl, author of Framing America "Berger is unafraid to tackle the major issues, and this book shows it."—Bruce Robertson, author of Marsden Hartley and Reckoning with Winslow Homer "Berger, writing on topics as diverse as landscape photography and early film, pushes into fascinating issues of gender, race, and class with sensitivity, insight, and largely jargon-free analysis. Having made a mark as a key Eakins scholar, he promises to achieve a similar feat in Sight Unseen, getting us to rethink traditional material in a new light."—John Wilmerding, Christopher Binyon Sarofim Professor of American Art, Princeton University