|
|
|
Cockeyed: A Memoir
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Atlantic Books (2007-01-11)
ISBN: 1843545632
EAN: 9781843545637
Paperback: 272 pages
Edition: Export e.
|
Customer Reviews
|
Shows the full compliment of human emotions...
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-09-05
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
When he was 18 Ryan Knighton was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa; which means he had night-blindness and tunnel vision before becoming completely blind. In `Cockeyed', Knighton explains about how this condition (and the realisation that he would lose his sight) affected his life and relationships to others. Far from being worthy and heavy going, he does this with a lightness of touch and a great deal of humour as well as occasional disbelief at the fact that he tried to carry on as if nothing was happening (and nearly killing himself in the process!) He drove for a full thirteen months between realising that something was wrong and getting his diagnosis, using cat's eye's to place himself on the road; `At night I drove Braille. Doesn't everybody?'
Knighton has a terrific way of explaining what he could see (describing tunnel vision as a dart board where you can only see the outside edge and the bull's eye.) He also gives a string of amusing anecdotes, including times when he has been happily dreaming to himself without giving thought to how he appears to others; `I inadvertently enter into a staring contest with strangers who, unaware of my blindness, peg me for either an apprenticing hypnotist, a vacant psychopath, or, worse, a poorly socialised lech.'
One of the most moving chapters deals with the premature death of his brother, in which he shows how losing someone can make us change our attitudes, and better still he manages this without ever slipping into cloying sentimentality.
|
|
IN THE WORLD OF THE BLIND, THE ONE-EYED MAN IS KING...
Rating  (4)
Date: 2007-06-03
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
This is an engaging memoir of an intelligent, articulate man who happens to be blind. As a teenager, the author developed the degenerative eye disease, retinitis pigmentosa, which slowly robbed him of his sight. He was about fourteen or so, when a portent of what lay in store for him visually began making itself manifest. He ignored the signs of his increasing visual challenges and even learned to drive a car, which he drove until it became clear that he was a danger on the road to himself and others. Some time would go by before he and his family would know what lay behind the author's seeming inability to see what was in front of him. When he discovered the reason, he would remain in denial for some time, stumbling about in a sighted world without the sight he needed to do so safely.
Eventually overcoming his reluctance to admit that, yes, he was going blind, he decided to adopt the use of a cane rather than a guide dog. With stick in hand, he moves about the world in a way that most of us would rather not. Yet, for all that he is blind, he sees the world around him in ways in which many sighted people fail to do. His observations are witty, funny, and irreverent, as he takes measure of his life and some of the indignities that blindness has imposed upon him. The author takes the reader on an unsentimental journey through his descent into blindness, only for the reader to discover just how interesting that journey is. The reader comes away thinking of the author not as a blind man but, rather, as a man who happens to be blind.
|
|
blind testosterone.
Rating  (3)
Date: 2007-04-12
As the title should tell you, Ryan Knighton tells his story in a boisterous and irreverent style, and it works beautifully to convey the classic farce of his tales on honeymoon in a Polish salt mine, or applying with trepidation for 'Gimp camp'. There is an awful lot of high quality humour in Cockeyed. It has to be said, though, that this same style sometimes becomes a weakness rather than a strength, most unfortunately at the very beginning. I just wasn't warming to the teenage machismo of the first few pages and the west-coast Canada colloquiallisms were a real barrier, causing me to throw the book down several times crying "what the hell does this sentence mean!?" Two other readers I know were just as frustrated at these first pages, so some revisions for a British edition might have saved less dogged readers from missing the book's rewards. But as Knighton warms to himself you warm to him too. Whether you have 20-20 vision or sight loss you'll learn something here - how (and why) do you conceal your blindness to hold down a job in Korea; what defines a community and why there's a deaf community but no such thing as a blind one; how independent can your sighted partner be; and just how ingeniously deft a device that simple white stick can be. You'll find your own intriguing nuggets. The blurb about mising the poignant and the knockabout funny is spot on - and poignant, for once, doesn't mean apple-pie mawkishness. Knighton's self-discovery is no new-age gush. This is clearly a first book - but if Knighton can take to heart his own words at the foot of page 260, and realise he's got my attention and doesn't need to keep jumping up and down ["...loud noises clutter and impede intimacy...All this bombastic competition for my ears. It pries me from the person with whom I'm speaking"] then I'll certainly be looking forward to reading what else he's got to say. Give it a go.
|
|
Fascinating........... highly recommended
Rating (4)
Date: 2007-02-07
As a close friend of someone who also has Retinitis Pigmentosa, the same condition as Ryan Knighton this book was enlightening, amusing and left me hooting with laughter and crying in the same chapter.
I couldn't put it down.
|
|
Amazon.com's Price:£0.01
 |
|
|
|