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Named one of the best books of the year by Slate, Chicago Tribune, Entropy Magazine, and named one of the top 10 memoirs by Library JournalInto the Wild�meets Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man�a lyrical memoir of a life changed in an instant and of the perilous beauty of searching for identity in solitude �On a clear May afternoon at the end of his junior year at Harvard, Howard Axelrod played a pick-up game of basketball. In a skirmish for a loose ball, a boy�s finger hooked behind Axelrod�s eyeball and left him permanently blinded in his right eye. A week later, he returned to the same dorm room, but to a different world. A world where nothing looked solid, where the distance between how people saw him and how he saw had widened into a gulf. Desperate for a sense of orientation he could trust, he retreated to a jerry-rigged house in the Vermont woods, where he lived without a computer or television, and largely without human contact, for two years. He needed to find, away from society�s pressures and rush, a sense of meaning that couldn�t be changed in an instant.From the Trade Paperback edition.