Ordinary Daylight: A Portrait of an Artist Going Blind

Synopsis

Andrew Potok is an intense, vigorous, sensual man--and a gifted painter. Then, passing forty, he rapidly begins to go blind from an inherited eye disease, retinitis pigmentosa. Depressed and angry, he rages at the losses that are eradicating his life as an artist, his sources of pleasure, his competence as a man. He hates himself for becoming blind. But as he will ultimately discover, and as this remarkable memoir recounts, it is not the end of the world. It is the beginning.

his the story of Potok's remarkable odyssey out of despair. He attempts to come to terms with his condition: learning skills for the newly blind, dealing with freakish encounters with the medical establishment, going to London for a promised cure through a bizarre and painful "therapy" of bee stings. He wrestles with the anguish of knowing that his daughter has inherited the same disease that is stealing his own eyesight. And then, as he edges ever closer to complete blindness, there comes the day when he recognizes that the exhilaration he once found in the mix of paint and canvas, hand and eye, he has begun to find in words.

By turns fierce, blunt, sexy, and uproariously funny, Andrew Potok's memoir of his journey is as shatteringly frank as it is triumphant.

Copyright:

1980

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9780307418272

Related ISBNs:

9780553381986

Publisher:

Bantam Dell

Date of Addition:

12/12/10

Copyrighted By:

Andrew Potok

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Disability-Related, Art and Architecture, Biographies and Memoirs, Medicine

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.