Adventures in Darkness: Memoirs of an Eleven-Year-Old Blind Boy, A Review
Adventures in Darkness: Memoirs of an Eleven-Year-Old Blind Boy
, by Tom Sullivan. (Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2007) Hardcover, 208 p. ISBN 9780785220817
Adventures in Darkness begins by describing how Tom and his two roommates climbed out of their window on a rope of knotted bed sheets, sawed through a locked gate, and set out in a boat. All three were trying to escape from the Perkins School for the Blind! The great escape went exactly as planned, but the eleven-year-olds had not planned far enough ahead and wound up in the shipping lanes of Boston Harbor. Fortunately the Coast Guard picked them up before they got themselves killed.
It was 1959, back when doctors routinely advised parents to have children with disabilities institutionalized. Tom wanted no part of it. He just wanted to live a normal life on the outside with friends and activities. This was not the first time that he had gotten in trouble at Perkins, or even the first time he had tried to escape. The director of the school had had enough and expelled him.
His mother wanted to keep him safe, but his father decided to help him gain the independence he so desperately wanted. During that summer, his father pushed him to box with the neighborhood bully and even pitch in a Little League baseball game. Tom, meanwhile, got into mischief on his own that even his father found appalling.
Tom Sullivan grew up to live the normal life he wanted, that is, if running in the Marine Corps marathon, playing golf at Augusta, and appearing on Tonight with Johnny Carson all in one lifetime can be considered normal. He is greatly in demand as a motivational speaker because along the way he learned that everyone can be independent to an extent, but that everyone must also be dependent on others and on God.
Adventures in Darkness is not just another book about how someone learned how to cope with a disability. We all had to go through being 11 and feeling misunderstood, alone, and not belonging. We have all had to face and overcome challenges in order to grow. Sullivan's artistry as a story teller has produced a book that is by turns hilarious, affecting, uplifting, and always tremendously fun to read.
Adventures in Darkness: Memoirs of an Eleven-Year-Old Blind Boy, A Review
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