This is the true story of a man’s heroic struggle against monumental difficulties, a man whose motto throughout life was “crashing through,” who, at the age of 46, faced his greatest challenge: to acquire sight, and learn to see, after having been blind since the age of three as the result of an accident.

In all those years, Mike May had never longed for vision, and had become a speed skier, successful inventor, and record-making entrepreneur. His tactic had been simply to barrel ahead at full tilt, just as though he could see perfectly, never mind that he suffered countless violent collisions. As a blind man, he had become serenely happy, fulfilled, and an inspiration to others both blind and not.

But a great personal upheaval was in store for him. It began when, after a casual, impromptu examination at the office of his wife’s optometrist, a certain Dr. Goodman turned on the lights, pulled up a stool, and said, “Mike, I think we can make you see.”

New stem cell technology had opened up the possibility of restoring sight in Mike’s one eye (the other had been removed).

There are those who think that the sense of sight is merely a matter of light rays striking the retina and being automatically interpreted by the brain. In fact, as this book shows, seeing is a vast intellectual project that has to be learned step by step.

A major part of this learning is the integration of sight with the other senses, particularly touch. When newly sighted Mike May only paid attention to what he saw, as far as he was concerned a shadow was an object to be avoided, and stairs just a flat and apparently safe sequence of lines. It was only when touching something while looking at it that Mike could comprehend what he was seeing.

But at first, Mike May’s method of learning how to see consisted largely of gathering clues, cues, and rules of thumb, a laborious process with disappointing results. Once, when inside a warehouse, “He tried to draw on context and expectation.... May searched harder for clues but found few. Boxes on shelves melded further together. Items flattened. Things still looked sharply in focus but had little meaning, and without meaning what was he seeing, really? He redoubled his efforts but quickly felt overwhelmed.”

Objectivists may notice here a intriguing parallel with the failure of the “look-say” method of teaching reading. In that method, the child is expected to figure out what word he is looking at by considering the context and the general shape of the word as a whole, rather than by seeing the word as a structure built up from fundamental units of sound and sight—that is, letters. In effect, Mike May was stopped by the fact that he had not learned his visual alphabet, that he was using macro methods when what he needed to do was first learn micro ones, then integrate them to the macro level.

Another factor may have been that he was past what might be termed the “sensitive period” (to borrow a term from early-childhood educator Maria Montessori) for learning how to interpret the visual field. The result of missing a sensitive period for a certain aspect of one’s development is “dropped stitches” in the fabric of one’s being; the garment still holds together and is functional, but it cannot be as good as it might have been.

Also, though the book and scientific opinion generally downplays the importance for depth perception of stereopsis (made possible by having two eyes rather than one), in my estimation it is much more important than is recognized, and having just a single eye was a significant impediment to Mike’s progress.

With a proper approach to learning how to see again, Mike May might nevertheless have saved himself a lot of the anguish that resulted from his trying to mow down difficulties by sheer brute force of memorization and explicit reasoning. He might have started a lot earlier than he did with the method that eventually worked for him. But the best scientific knowledge available at the time seemed to support what his doctor eventually told him: “However hard you work at vision, Mike, I don’t think you’ll ever see fluently, the way normal people do. It will always be incredibly hard work.”

To his credit, though the doctor’s statement rattled him for a while, part of him did not accept it. After thinking long and hard, he said to his wife: “They have to be wrong.... They must have made a mistake.”

I leave the reader to discover how he “crashed through” this barrier. Horrendous problems lay ahead even then. At one point, he would be forced, if he wished to continue seeing, to undergo direct needles into his eye—with no anesthetic. The author, Kurson, describes the first treatment: “He’d broken bones before, smashed his face. This was different. This pain was primitive. It was prehistoric.” And he would have to return repeat the procedure. Mike asked, “How many more?” “We don’t know yet. It could be three, five, maybe more.”

Concerning the nature of sight and its recovery, there was actually little in this book that came as news to me, for I had long ago arrived at the same ideas introspectively. While reading, I could even see the error in the thinkers’ giving too much weight to association, habit, and induction in vision, and not enough to the deductive principles of understanding shapes and motion and to grasping the macro field in terms of the micro. (I believe this error is manifested in the current understanding of the so-called Charlie Chaplin illusion, but that is another topic.) To me, this is another demonstration of how science needs philosophy, epistemology properly being mainly dependent on introspection.

How does it all turn out for Mike? I leave that for the book to communicate.

I’ll say this. Ayn Rand could not have heard about Mike May, whose sight was restored in 1999. But she had apparently read about some of the very rare similar case histories, and in her comment, she never spoke truer words: “An unusual kind of moral strength and of personal ambition (i.e., self-esteem) is required to regain one’s sight: a profound love of life, a passionate refusal to remain a cripple, an intense dedication to the task of achieving the best within one’s reach. The reward is commensurate.”