Thing 5: vision improvement books reviewed

Well, this is an easy one for me. I often leverage the awesome information Amazon gives us by presenting not only the publisher's information, but also any number of personally supplied reviews from customers. Of course one is wise to view the personal reviews carefully, but when one of our faculty-members told me he relies upon Amazon reviews for computer science books - and he is a published computer scientist himself - I began taking them more seriously.

Lately I have been thinking a great deal about vision improvement, partially because my current subscription seems to have worsened. In High School I briefly owned a book about vision improvement through exercises designed to strengthen the eye muscles. I found a similar book in a used bookstore some time later, but did not use or hold on to either long.

A search on "vision improvement" in Amazon revealed a host of books on the subject. The book I had owned years ago must have been "Sight Without Glasses" - a classic in the field (published in the '30s) by William H. Bates, MD. He was the first to recommend a program of exercises instead of glasses - a set of techniques still referred to as "the Bates method." I distinctly recall selling it to a used bookstore clerk in Pittsburgh who swore up and down that it was a hoax book.

Nope - it was legit, but widely disdained. Bates was a pioneer in this field whose work has been built upon over the years. Today, the searcher interested in learning more has a number of titles and techniques to choos from, among them: "Re-learning to see", "Take off your glasses and see", "The Secret of perfect vision", etc. All advocate exercises to improve eye-muscle relaxation and control, and maintain that prescription lenses actually worsen the problem. I do recall reading enough of the Bates book to understand his thesis: the vision of eyesight correction which won out is that only through prescription lenses can vision be improved. This view is somewhat self-serving, since the public must then come to the optomatrists for glasses.

Among the best-reviewed of the books is "The Program for Better Vision" by Martin A. Sussman, developed right here in MA by the Cambridge Institute for Better Vision. The book I owned for awhile but did not read was "28 Days to reading without glasses" by Lisette Scholl (I remember that distinctive name). It was not among the better reviewed titles, at least according to Amazon.com's voluntary reviewers.

So I both learned something about a subject which has long dwelt at the back of my mind, and used Amazon's power to take a virtual and memory tour of my former bookshelf - all the way back into High School (which was long ago for me). Very enlightening.