Amazon Review
Blind. Far from being an objective medical term, the word carries cultural baggage far in excess of the narrow definition from which it starts. Stephen Kuusisto could not bring himself to apply it personally, despite severely impaired vision; nor could his family. His mother in fact acquired the art of seeing ghosts as an expression of her inability to relate to her son. Planet of the Blind traces the struggle Kuusisto endured with his family, our society, but most of all with himself to come to terms with his condition and make peace with his soul. It is a harrowing, angry, majestic journey that burns an image into the mind's eye long after it is finished.

Kuusisto was a premature baby, with under-developed retinas that were then scarred by an over- oxygenated incubator. Aged three he hid his first pair of glasses under the leaves of a rhubarb plant; through his 20s he was still riding a bicycle, by making his head "tilt towards the light". Rather than be pigeon-holed by society he resolutely remained in the darkness of the closet, emerging only to collide with the world. It took a state of unemployed depression for him finally to grasp a cane--a "divining rod", as he puts it--and, the door unlatched, he trains for a dog, Corky, who provides a confidence and lease of life that he had denied himself for so long.

Kuusisto's unflinching prose sparkles with the grace of the poet he also is and time after time he wields phrases that thrill in their unexpected beauty. As an account of coming to terms with vision impairment it is brutally honest and searching; as a debut literary offering it bristles with a darkly original talent that refuses to be hidden under the rhubarb. --David Vincent