Louis Braille: A Touch of Genius

This charming coffee-table book is overstuffed with pictures, letters and every type of Louis Braille memorabilia imaginable. Unabashedly admiring, the author acknowledges his goal is not to write a ""pathography"" of Braille, and indeed, readers will find none of Braille's hidden vices (nor any hints of their presence) to enliven this life story. But Braille's life in the middle of the 19th century provides a rich narrative: a man who, blinded during boyhood, devoted himself to teaching other blind people better ways of negotiating their world. In addition to devising the raised-dot alphabet, Braille also set up a system for musical notation and built printing machines for his alphabets. The writing here is straightforward and suits the reverential tone of the text, which incorporates photo-reproductions of Braille's correspondences (both dictated and those he printed using his printing techniques) and provides a brief history of the contentious debate over standardizing the Braille system. If the tone seems boosterish, the book accomplishes its goal-to highlight the goodness and inventiveness of a man who transformed the lives of blind people worldwide.