With a foreword by Oliver Sacks Shortly after John Hull went blind, after years of struggling with failing vision, he had a dream in which he was trapped on a sinking ship, submerging into another, unimaginable world. The power of this calmly eloquent, intensely perceptive memoir lies in its thorough navigation of the world of blindness—a world in which stairs are safe and snow is frightening, where food and sex lose much of their allure and playing with one's child may be agonizingly difficult. As he describes the ways in which blindness shapes his experience of his wife and children, of strangers helpful and hostile, and, above all, of his God, Hull becomes a witness in the highest, true sense. Touching the Rock is a book that will instruct, move, and profoundly transform anyone who reads it.

This calmly eloquent, deeply perceptive memoir of a writer and theologian who lost his vision in his mid-forties conveys the unimaginable and ushers its readers into the world of blindness--a world in which the faces of loved ones recede into memory or speculation while the presence of God becomes supremely important.

An intensely personal exploration of blindness reveals a world of sound and echo, of people without faces, of the strange relationship between waking and dreaming, and of new perceptions of nature, personality, and human experience

Tells the story of the Grand Island Chippewa Indians and also presents a morality play about the phlight of populations destroyed by the violence of other cultures.