Scattered Shadows
A Memoir of Blindness and Vision
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A remarkable memoir of resilience, spiritual awakening, and physical transformation from the celebrated author of Black Like Me.
In 1945, after suffering severe injuries during World War II, John Howard Griffin faced the gradual loss of his eyesight. Plunged into total sightlessness at age twenty-seven, he refused to surrender to despair or social stereotypes. In Scattered Shadows: A Memoir of Blindness and Vision, Griffin details his decade in darkness, recounting his intense search for meaning, his studies in Gregorian chant at the Abbey of Solesmes, his conversion to Catholicism, and his unexpected emergence as an acclaimed novelist and cattle breeder.
Drawing directly from personal journals, this volume provides an intimate record of survival and revelation:
Follow Griffin's adaptation to sightlessness and his fight for personal independenceDiscover his deep friendships with artists, musicians, and monks across France and TexasWitness the creative breakthrough behind novels written during years of darknessExperience the stunning moment in 1957 when his vision spontaneously returned
For readers of inspirational autobiography, spiritual reflections, and disability history, Griffin offers a profound look at what it truly means to see.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These posthumous memoirs, arranged by Robert Bonazzi, focus on the years between 1945, when Griffin (1920 1980) began to lose his sight due to an injury he received during WWII, and 1957, when he recovered it a decade during which he virtually lived several lives. At the book's center is Griffin's journey from a wanderer who "could no more fix my attention lovingly on God than I could on the wallpaper of the room" to a Catholic convert for whom faith "replaced logic, erasing the need for further proof." Around that center, Griffin traverses the emotional and physical distance between the implications of being legally blind and the reality of blindness, which "presented a thousand roadblocks." Readers learn how Griffin managed to raise livestock, fall in love and marry, and write the controversial 1952 novel The Devil Rides Outside. The author's previous lives had encompassed a scholarly devotion to medieval music and an activist involvement in the French Resistance. Black Like Me, his 1961 bestselling account of his trip through the South posing as a black man, was yet to come. Drawing on Griffin's journals, manuscripts and previously published work, Bonazzi's collection pays an almost too-reverent homage to a remarkable individual. As journal excerpts come to dominate, dulling minutiae invade. Yet Griffin's spiritual journey remains moving, and his way with words renders the austerity of an abbey as vividly as the cacophony of a battleground, an evening with a nameless blind man as fascinating as one with a renowned poet.
