{"product_id":"9780807075463","title":"The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eNamed one of the best books of the year by \u003ci\u003eSlate, Chicago Tribune, Entropy Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e, and named one of the top 10 memoirs by \u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eInto the Wild\u003c\/i\u003e meets \u003ci\u003ePortrait of the Artist as a Young Man\u003c\/i\u003e—a lyrical memoir of a life changed in an instant and of the perilous beauty of searching for identity in solitude\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Beacon Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47041404043504,"sku":"9780807075463","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780807075463_p0.jpg?v=1763725484","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780807075463","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}