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A person may be legally blind, yet not ""blind enough"" to qualify for social services. Beth Omansky explores the lives of people with legal blindness to show how society responds to those who don't fit neatly into the disabled/nondisabled binary. Probing the experience of education, rehabilitation, and work, as well as the more intimate spheres of religion, family, and romantic relationships, her frank and theoretically sophisticated portrait of the legally blind experience offers an original insight into our understanding of the social construction of disability.|A person may be legally blind, yet not ""blind enough"" to qualify for social services. Beth Omansky explores the lives of people with legal blindness to show how society responds to those who don't fit neatly into the disabled/nondisabled binary. Probing the experience of education, rehabilitation, and work, as well as the more intimate spheres of religion, family, and romantic relationships, her frank and theoretically sophisticated portrait of the legally blind experience offers an original insight into our understanding of the social construction of disability.

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CHOICE Review

This is the book this reviewer has been looking for as a text for a disability studies research and methodologies course, which is focused on qualitative research methods. The author's approach confounds the usual positivist research techniques based on the medical model of disability, particularly that of blindness. Independent scholar Omansky writes that there is "a false binary of sightness/blindness" pervading every aspect of society, including medicine, education, the workplace, the built environment, religion, attitudes, and beliefs. She complicates the experience of blindness as not just darkness, but with the ambiguous definitions of legal blindness and who is "really" blind through the use of emancipatory disability research principles and postmodern theories to analyze the experiences of people with visual impairments. She bases her methodology on the existential phenomenological case study of life stories collected through open-ended interviews. The life stories are complex, funny, frustrating, and bring a new level of understanding past what Omansky describes as "ocularcentric," or as putting sight at the center of the human experience. Ocularcentrism has serious consequences, and one example is the fact that in the US, 81 percent of blind people are unemployed. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. P. A. Murphy adjunct, University of Toledo