Life Unseen: The Story of Blindness

We are all fascinated by blindness: partly from fear of how we would cope - and partly from the curiosity of experiencing the world without sight. Any mention of the word ‘blind’ or ‘blindness’ comes with an elusive coat of mystery and a sense of the unknown. Life Unseen is the first accessible history of the subject written in over fifty years - a powerful and erudite investigation of how the physical state of not seeing, either from birth or during life, affects the life of an individual, a community and a civilization. Selina Mills, journalist and BBC producer, was born blind in one eye and is now losing - completely - the remaining sight she has. In this book, she provides an unsentimental social history of blindness and the blind, with a uniquely personal slant, investigating how the absence of vision has affected our lives, our senses and society from antiquity to the present. Combining her own experience with an examination of the history of blindness in the Western world, she shows that sightlessness has been an ‘active’ force in history, rather than the passive condition which is too readily assumed.