I don't wish to provide a summary of too many plot points, as I might destroy some of the surprises of this memoir. Point in case, imagine my surprise when the author reveals that his best friend in college was Arthur, none other than Arthur Garfunkel. Yes, THAT Arthur. ( Lucky for us, Art decided to become a singer rather than an architect.) I believe the author's friendship with Art should have continued to be the major thread running through this book. I found their relationship fascinating. Sanford Greenberg had me in the palm of his hand until about 2/3 of the way through, when the tone of the memoir became more like a curriculum vitae. The connection and warmth disappeared, and the reader was left with too many unanswered questions.

I received a copy of this memoir From NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

5+★
“I am tall. That helps me get ready in the morning because I am able to lean well over the sink when I shave, and that’s important. If I cut myself, the blood will spill into the sink. When I do cut myself, I may or may not be aware of it, but regardless, every day after I have finished shaving, I wash my face with very cold water to seal up any nicks or cuts. I make minor prayers for tiny nicks, hoping to avoid the more serious cuts. My life is full of minor prayers.”

Sanford Greenberg’s life has been full of a lot of things, not just minor prayers. I can’t remember when I was last so awestruck by the life and achievements of an individual. He calls himself the “luckiest man in the world” and then goes on to tell us why.

Here’s a passage where he tries to tell us the advantages he’s enjoyed since becoming blind at eighteen.

“We do not wonder what is beyond the horizon because we do not have horizons. For us, horizons just do not exist.
. . .
With no horizons and no visual sensations to compete with and anchor my thoughts, I don’t have the same sense of boundaries shared by people impaired with sight. Sometimes this has to do with the physical world in front of me; sometimes I experience it as a vague border between the dream state and the waking state.”

I often experience this vague border between dreaming and waking, and I have to say I love it, so I’m pleased it’s on the plus side of his equation. The disadvantages are obvious. He was a terrific student and in his first year at Colombia University in New York City, he met his new roommate, Art Garfunkel, then a philosophical, dreamy, quirky, brilliant guy who became his best friend for life. Another stroke of luck.

My Goodreads has a photo with the caption:
Art and Sandy - roommates at Columbia People.com

These two young men pondered the nature of life, the colour of grass, the great art of the world, philosophy – you name it, they talked about it. They were both certainly more cerebral and passionately inquisitive than most people I’ve known at eighteen.

They were a couple of Jewish boys who shared a common culture and outlook. Sandy loved his trumpet and played drums, while Art played guitar and sang ‘a bit’, sometimes with a neighbour, Paul (Simon).

“Making music is like a prescription for a disease that cannot be cured but whose symptoms can be alleviated. Music did that for me back then, and still does.”

We learn how Sandy lost his sight and how he made a promise to God from his hospital bed. We all do this, I think, say things in our heads like ‘If I just get out of this alive, I promise I will stop, start, do, or be something . . . (name your own penance). The difference is, Greenberg did it!

With the help of Sue (then girlfriend, later wife - yes, more luck!) and Art and countless friends and readers who recorded all of his reading assignments, he went all the way through Harvard Law School and then got a scholarship to study at Oxford. This was before tiny recorders, of course. Reel-to-reel tape decks were enormous.

He is actually lucky in that he has a spectacular memory and that he somehow manages with only four hours of sleep a night. That's prisoner-of-war torture for me!

He says he is lucky in that his eyes look ‘normal’ and he wears glasses, which helps to make him appear ‘normal’ as well. If he puts his hand out first (pre-Covid!), people shake hands so he doesn’t have to fumble around looking for theirs.

My Goodreads has a photo with the caption:
Sanford D Greenberg, author Photo Hill Press

He has found all kinds of tricks to not look like that poor blind guy he once saw begging on the streets. He was adamant he wouldn't have a guide dog to advertise that he was blind. Stubborn!

His career, which took him to the White House and the various halls of power, wouldn’t be believed if it were fiction. But it isn’t. He was in the Johnson White House, talks about the man, the wheeling and dealing and the fun.

“We knew how to let off steam, but when we worked, we worked hard. We were responsible, we were fresh, we brought something new to the table. We thought all that, anyway, and perhaps it was true. When you work in the White House, people are likely to listen to you and want to talk with you, because, again, it is all about access.”

But there is a downside.

“But you also lose a certain innocence in the White House. You see things you do not want to see. You see people behaving in an untoward manner, such as a staffer rifling through another staffer’s desk. If the president says, ‘Let us sit down and reason together,’ it means you’ve already lost.

I had come into the White House believing everything. I left believing half, or three-fourths, which means that I had lost the comfort of uncritical belief.
. . .
One thing we knew a year before the ‘New York Times’ and others blew it open was that the [Vietnam] war was a disaster for the United States. It was hard to accept.”

He was lucky that an exercise they learned to do in an art class gave him a useful perspective for handling himself without sight. He’s very good at knowing where he is, although he never speaks of using anything like echolocation or other orientation skills that people have developed more recently. He seems to have instincts that he keeps strengthening and that work for him.

“From learning at Columbia how to identify entire drawings from a single line or section, I can in a similar way put together a work of art or an entire room.”

A personal digression:
I remember having to learn how to do this with classical music - hear just a tiny bit of music and know which work it was from and where in the work. These days, people quote lines from The Simpsons and Seinfeld back and forth to each other and know which episode they're from, but it's not really the same thing, is it?

When his first child was born, he knew what he wanted them to learn about the world. Music, art, nature - beauty.

“I wanted my children to see beauty in this world. Arthur, more than I, more than Sue, would be able to provide that. He became a second father to my children.”

He and Art and his two older kids took a terrific road trip around the country, particularly some of my favourite places in the West, and I loved his account of it. He paints just as vivid a picture of it all from the descriptions he’s given as they travel and from his memories. He is always grateful for how much he read and haunted museums as a kid.

Music plays in the car, Art sings along. Art’s music is the soundtrack to this book. I can hear all the songs that I love so much. He complains about some things on the recordings, but who cares? I loved all of Simon and Garfunkel's music. Enjoy this one, which applies to Greenberg's story: The Sound of Silence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAEpp...

My Goodreads has a photo with the caption:
Sandy and Art, many years later nationalgeographic.com

I don’t know how Greenberg sat still, biting his tongue, when meeting Werner von Braun, whom most Americans know as a rocket scientist, but whom he could think of only as a former Nazi SS officer who may have been responsible for the deaths of so many of his people.

“We concluded the meeting. I stood up, and we shook hands. His hand had shaken that of President Kennedy. His hand had grasped the hand of Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler. His hand had buttoned the tunic of a black SS uniform, had risen to hail Hitler. On his way back to the officers’ quarters after dinner, might he have paused one night to look up at the starry sky he loved so much and seen the souls of Jewish people passing into the heavens?”

It's hard to single out Greenberg's most remarkable achievement – except – this last one, prompted by a meeting with Jonas Salk, of polio vaccine fame.

But I must backtrack a bit, to that hospital bed in Detroit after his eye operation and his promise to God. He didn’t know where to start to save other people from his situation (an early glaucoma that was exacerbated by the wrong medication).

Almost nobody knew of his promise, so he could have let it go. Instead, he confided in his good friend Sol Linowitz, (who turned the company called Haloid into Xerox, just to drop another name), and Linowitz offered to introduce him to Dr Jonas Salk, famous for the polio vaccine. Salk is the one who inspired him to widen his vision, so to speak.

“For the first time, I felt there was realistic hope for the promise I had made to God. The reason: Dr. Salk had urged upon me a focus beyond the treatment of a disease’s symptoms or its individual physiological effects. After all, he had made his own objective nothing less than to end a disease … and he succeeded! In my mind, I repeated, ‘End it! End it! End it!’ I have never forgotten that.”

I will end here, myself. The Sanford and Sue Greenberg End Blindness Prize of $3million dollars was won in December 2020 by a group of 13 scientists. Note: not end glaucoma or any specific condition. END BLINDNESS!
https://endblindness2020.com/

My Goodreads has a photo with the caption:
Picture of a lucky man! jewishweek.timesofisrael.com

It is a marvellous read, full of anecdotes and populated with people you’ve heard of and seen in the news. The people who get out there and DO things. Amazing. Thanks to NetGalley and Post Hill Press for the review copy.

Here are links to a couple of other good articles, if you can read them.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hello-darkness-my-old-friend-anupam-vaid/?articleId=6692728499402268673

https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/old-friends

Thank you to #Netgalley for this book.

An interesting book about how one copes with blindness from glaucoma at age 19 when he was in his first year of Columbia University in New York. He never let it rule or lead his life and refused to use a cane or a guide dog. At this time, he met Art Garfukel (as in Simon and Garfunkel) and he became his best friend and went with him everywhere as a guide. He was and probably still is a close friend and almost like a brother. I have to admit that I wanted to read this book for this friendship and he was a prominent person in his life along with his wife Sue who he met in grade school. 60 years later they are still married with children and grandchildren.

He persevered in life his own way and like he said since he had his sight until 19 years old he can imagine what things look like. He's still a strong figure in advanced ways of preventing blindness when this book was published (2020).

As the book went on, it became more business like and I became a little bit bored and the writing became "over my head" in phrases and chapters.

One interesting thing almost at the end of this book, he had an "imaginary" party, where people from past and present where there all having a good time and talking to each other. I guess this was his way of seeing people together that he admired (both professional, friends and family). It was sure different but I enjoyed it.

This book was very inspiring and heartwarming. Rising above disabilities and ending triumphant is the American dream, and the author shows this in every page.

Such a warm and touching story. Never would have known that about the reason behind the song was Such a truly remarkable person.

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend is a beautifully written uplifting memoir by Dr. Sanford Greenberg. Released 30th June 2020 by Post Hill Press, it's 240 pages (print edition) and available in hardcover and ebook formats.

This is a well told autobiography/memoir written by a fascinating, brilliant, erudite, and gently humorous man who maintained a positive attitude and incredible work ethic in the face of his loss of sight as a young man.

I picked up this memoir because of the author's close association and lifelong friendship with one of my favorite artists, Art Garfunkel. I was not expecting to enjoy this charming read on its own merits, or be as impressed as I am by this intelligent and capable man's voice. He has an important story to tell and I felt improved for having read it.

In addition to the story itself, the book includes an introduction by Art Garfunkel as well as a foreword by Ruth Bader Ginsburg (!!!) and afterword by Margaret Atwood. From the first page to the last, this was a fascinating and worthwhile experience. Five stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

In spite of poverty, Sandy had everything going for him. Then he went blind at nineteen. Not inky blackness but to never clearly see loved ones or the printed page. But he didn't need sight to see his college roommate/best friend/support system at his side in the worst days of his life. Without Arthur's help would he have gotten his PhD, gone to Yale, then Oxford? But Sandy did all these things and more, including devising a specialized tape recorder and getting a patent for it, married his childhood sweetheart, had children, met several POTUS and worked inside the capitol. He always remained driven but later learned (metaphorically) to stop and smell the roses. And Arthur? He became a singer/songwriter until he left that business and did well with his wife and children. And his friend, Sandy. This is a very moving story and I am thankful to have been able to read it.
I requested and received a free ebook copy from Post Hill Press via NetGalley. Thank you!