I couldn’t hope to write without the love and support of the Wisniewski family—Kazimiera, Eugeniusz, and Paula. They are my family and I love them.
Finally, thanks to Amy, Nate, and Will Kurson. They are my true loves and inspiration. I have never known a heart like Amy’s, nor a greater champion. For more reasons than I could hope to list, this is her book as much as it is mine.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
I spent hundreds of hours over two years interviewing Mike May: at his home in Davis, California; alongside him during his business trips to Chicago, Washington, D.C., Sacramento, San Francisco, London, Los Angeles, Kalamazoo, and the Kirkwood Ski Resort in the California mountains; and by telephone and Internet during his travels to Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Central and South America.
Jennifer May granted me dozens of hours of interview time, both at her home in Davis and by phone. Carson and Wyndham May popped in and out of interview sessions to add memories of the year in which their father gained vision. I interviewed May’s family, friends, and teachers to learn about his life.
Human vision—and the brain’s role in it—is a massively complex subject. It was explained to me in person by Dr. Richard Gregory in England; Professors Ione Fine, Geoff Boynton, and Donald MacLeod in San Diego; Dr. Alex Wade at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco; and Dr. Steven Shevell at the University of Chicago. I benefited greatly from the textbook Sensation and Perception (sixth edition) by E. Bruce Goldstein, published by Wadsworth; I can’t remember reading a textbook at once so engaging and educational. For the role of knowledge in vision, I read Richard L. Gregory’s books Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing from Princeton University Press, and The Intelligent Eye from McGraw Hill, as well as his monograph “Knowledge for vision: vision for knowledge” from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. V. S. Ramachandran’s A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Imposter
Poodles to Purple Numbers from Pi Press provided a lively primer in the miracle of the brain.
Sight recovery after a lifetime of blindness is extraordinarily rare. For accounts of those cases (the first dates back about a thousand years) I relied on M. Von Senden’s hard-to-find book Space and Sight from Methuen & Co., and Alberto Valvo’s equally rare pamphlet “Sight Restoration after Long-Term Blindness: The Problems and Behavior Patterns of Visual Rehabilitation,” from American Foundation for the Blind. For the case of Virgil, I read Oliver Sacks’s beautiful article “To See and Not See,” originally published in The New Yorker and taken from his book An Anthropologist on Mars, published by Vintage Books. I learned the case of Sidney Bradford from Gregory’s seminal paper, “Recovery from Early Blindness: A Case Study,” written with Jean Wallace and published in the “Experimental Psychology Society Monograph No. 2,” and from interviews I did with Gregory in England.
I came to understand the technical and scientific details of May’s own case through extensive interviews with Fine, Boynton, Wade, MacLeod, and Dr. Daniel F. Goodman. Invaluable to me was Fine’s groundbreaking paper “Long-term Deprivation Affects Visual Perception and Cortex,” published in Nature Neuroscience, volume 6, number 9.
The revolutionary and complex stem cell surgery that restored May’s vision was explained to me by Dr. Edward J. Holland, director of Cornea Services at the Cincinnati Eye Institute and professor of clinical ophthalmology at the University of Cincinnati; Dr. Ali Djalilian, assistant professor of ophthalmology at the University of Illinois at Chicago; and by Dr. Goodman, the ophthalmologist who performed the operation on May.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Chapter Thirteen, inverted face photographs, courtesy of the author
Chapter Thirteen, Shepard Tables, courtesy of Dr. Roger Shepard. First appeared in Mind Sights by Roger N. Shepard, published by W. H. Freeman and Company, New York, 1990.
Chapter Fourteen, Chaplin mask, courtesy of Richard L. Gregory
Chapter Fourteen, “Terror Subterra,” courtesy of Dr. Roger Shepard. First appeared in Mind Sights by Roger N. Shepard, published by W. H. Freeman and Company, New York, 1990.
Chapter Fourteen, turtle fossil, courtesy of John P. Adamek, EDCOPE Enterprises, Fossilmall.com
Chapter Fourteen, fish fossil, courtesy of Denise Neville
Chapter Fourteen, strange tool, courtesy of the author
Chapter Fourteen, stem cell slide, courtesy of Dr. Tung-Tien Sun
Chapter Fourteen, cats in baskets, illustration by Lopata Design
Chapter Fourteen, occlusion, illustration by Lopata Design
Chapter Fourteen, relative height, illustration by Lopata Design
Chapter Fourteen, cast shadows, illustration by Lopata Design
Chapter Fourteen, eight balls, illustration by Lopata Design
Chapter Fourteen, dolphins, Marc M. Ellis, www.h2opictures.com
Chapter Fourteen, mountain range, courtesy of Free High Resolution Photos, www.pointie.com/free_photos
Chapter Fourteen, railroad tracks, courtesy of the author
Chapter Fourteen, texture gradient, courtesy of the author
Chapter Fourteen, shape from shading, illustration by Lopata Design
Chapter Fourteen, windmill, Marc M. Ellis, www.h2opictures.com
Chapter Fourteen, elephant, side view, courtesy of David Shapson
Chapter Fourteen, elephant, rear view, courtesy of David Shapson
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ROBERT KURSON earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, then a law degree from Harvard Law School. After working as a features reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago magazine, he moved to Esquire as a contributing editor. His award-winning stories have also appeared in Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and other publications. He lives in Chicago and can be reached via the Internet at www.robertkurson.com.
ALSO BY ROBERT KURSON
SHADOW DIVERS
Copyright © 2007 by Robert Kurson
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This book is based, in part, on an article written by the author entitled “Into the Light,” which appeared in Esquire in June 2005.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Kurson, Robert.
Crashing through: a true story of risk, adventure, and the man who dared to see / Robert Kurson.
p. cm.
1. Blind—United States—Biography. 2. Eye—Surgery—Patients—United States—Biography. 3. Blind—Rehabilitation—United States—Case studies. I. May, Mike, 1953– II. Title.
HV1792.M39K87 2007 362.4'1092—dc22 [B] 2007003092
www.atrandom.com
eISBN: 978-1-58836-625-2
v3.0
Crashing Through Page 31
