Traveling Blind: Life Lessons from Unlikely Teachers

For 35 years Laura Fogg has worked with blind children and their families, traveling throughout beautiful and sometimes treacherous Mendocino County, using her car as an office and her abundant creativity as her main teaching tool. In her remarkable memoir, Traveling Blind: Life Lessons from Unlikely Teachers, Fogg describes the challenges and delights in her life's work while portraying blindness as a condition that can be difficult and inconvenient to deal with, but which does not have to rob people of their humanity, intelligence, or zest for living.

Fogg is remarkable in herself, having pioneered the use of the red-tipped white cane—formerly reserved for blind adults—with very young children and with those who have multiple impairments. Combining the best of American ingenuity and pioneering spirit with insight, intelligence, humility and a fierce belief that all humans deserve the right to have a say in the course of their lives, Fogg has guided countless blind children in achieving independence.

In Traveling Blind Fogg tells the stories of fifteen of the students whose lives and experiences had the greatest impact on her. In these tales, each child is seen for who he is—rather than for who he is not, and each teaches Laura lessons about patience, hope, doubt, loss, control, judgment and, ultimately, joy.

Traveling Blind: Life Lessons from Unlikely Teachers brings a deeper understanding of the struggles, perils and unexpected wonders of learning to negotiate this world without vision. Fogg relates her experiences, both in teaching and in learning to travel blindfolded herself, with honesty and insight, and never reduces a child to someone who should be pitied.