The Best Books on Blindness and the Brain on Shepherd.com is a grateful nod to the authors that deepened the sciencey bits of There Plant Eyes! Oliver Sacks, John Locke, Lawrence Rosenblum, Jason Roberts, & @DavidEagleman—whose book Livewired came out after I’d finished TPE but surely would have been in there.
Why I wrote this Blindness and the Brain list
Thanks to a degenerative retinal eye disease, I’ve lived on pretty much every notch of the sight-blindness continuum. While going blind super slowly I’ve engaged with the science of seeing and not-seeing as an academic and artist for about 25 years. I like to say that there are as many ways of being blind as there are of being sighted, there are just fewer of us. besides teaching literature and humanities courses at NYU, I’ve lectured on art, accessibility, technology, and disability at universities and institutions around the country. I love sharing stories about the brain on blindness, and hope you find my recommendations as fascinating as I do:
Check out The Best Books on Blindness and the Brain!
And here’s a bit from Shepherd’s founder, Ben Fox from their About page
As a reader, I am incredibly frustrated with the bleak wasteland that is online book discovery. The big bookstores sell books like they sell toothpaste without passion. And Goodreads is more of a spreadsheet than a book discovery experience. How you find a book is important. That search is the start of a journey and should be fun.
Discovering a new book should be a magical experience where the search is part of the fun. That is what we are creating. We give readers fun ways to find amazing books.
I love wandering around bookstores and letting random books capture my attention. Nothing will ever replace the “bookstore experience,” but I want to reimagine book discovery online with more serendipity and delight.
I also want to help authors meet more readers. Authors illuminate our world, take us on faraway journeys, and entertain us. There is a growing trend that authors have to become their own marketing team. That concerns me because it is tough to do. I want to make it easier for authors to meet the readers who are most likely to be interested in their books…
Here is a much longer version with more info on me and why I started this website.