In 1973, when Joshua A. Miele was 4, a disturbed neighbor poured acid on his head, irretrievably damaging his face and blinding him. This tragedy radically changed Miele’s life. But Connecting Dots: A Blind Life isn’t a memoir about a poor, brave blind man overcoming great odds; Miele himself doesn’t like those kinds of stories. Written with veteran journalist Wendell Jamieson, this coming-of-age story focuses on the unconventional childhood and young adulthood that led Miele to become an award-winning innovator and disability activist.
Though Miele is straightforward in detailing the acid attack, its ensuing grueling surgeries and the event’s effect on his life, the narrative gives more weight to evoking place and time: the gritty, freewheeling Brooklyn neighborhood of Miele’s ’70s childhood, and his parents’ hippieish lifestyle in their ramshackle townhouse. He goes on to similarly evoke his drug-fueled teen years in the suburbs, and the idiosyncrasies of late ’80s and ’90s Berkeley, California, where he attended the University of California at a time when disability resources were scarce.
Read our Q&A with Joshua A. Miele, author of ‘Connecting Dots.’
From childhood on, Miele was curious about the world and passionate about space exploration. His stepfather, an earth scientist named Klaus, fueled that curiosity by providing tactile maps that Miele could study and explore. Ultimately, these early passions—and moving through the world as a blind person—led Miele to his life’s work, designing tactile and audio apps and adaptations for blind people, and to the MacArthur fellowship he was awarded in his 50s. “My blindness is my identity,” he writes, “it is the aspect of my life that has most shaped me and I am deeply proud of it, but I’ll always wrestle with certain facets of it.” One such facet is what he calls “the Deal”: how sighted people feel pity for those blind, offering them charity, a free meal, a discount, a seat on the bus—in other words, treating them as less than. He recounts a number of such incidents from his childhood, including the time he and his older brother avoided getting mugged because his brother made sure that the would-be muggers could see Miele’s face.
With its engaging voice, humor and a little sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, Connecting Dots is an illuminating portrait of a life that’s without sight, but not without vision.
