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  • The Point of Vanishing

  • A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude
  • Written by: Howard Axelrod
  • Narrated by: Howard Axelrod
  • Length: 6 hrs and 20 mins
  • 5.0 out of 5 stars (1 rating)

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The Point of Vanishing

Written by: Howard Axelrod
Narrated by: Howard Axelrod
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Publisher's Summary

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.

©2015 Howard Axelrod (P)2016 Tantor

What the critics say

"A vibrant, honest, and poetic account of how two years of solitude surrounded by nature changed a man forever." ( Kirkus)

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Book as friend, for a week.

I am sad this audiobook just came to an end; it's like I'm saying goodbye to a friend. In the process, myself, of making a big transition in life after some upheaval, I feel a poignant connection to this story, but I am also buoyed somehow. New stories to live out. The author's reading was just right, as one would hope, not dramatic, not too casual, well-paced and warm. I cried at times, which is unusual with me and books, but some of his descriptions are so beautiful, and other passages about his inner states sometimes touched me so deeply that I realized I'd never quite been able to name my own, similar states as accurately. I hope there is more by this writer that I can listen to.

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