Book Review Title: Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening Author: Stephen Kuusisto Publisher: W. W. Norton, 2006 Cloth, ISBN: 0-393-05892-1, 244 pages Cost: $23.95 USD Reviewer: Steven E. Brown I have not yet read Kuusisto’s earlier memoir, Planet of the Blind, so I picked up Eavesdropping only knowing that many of my colleagues have raved about the author’s way with words. I agree. I found Eavesdropping delightful. Kuusisto writes prose like the poet he is. In two sections and twenty-nine essays he explains what it is like to spend moments and days in auditory “sight-seeing.” My self-perception is as a visual and tactile learner so I wondered how I would relate to a book called Eavesdropping? As it happens I read most of the book during a 2006 day Hawai‘i experienced an earthquake and O’ahu lost all its electricity for many hours. At one point during that unusually quiet day I purposefully listened and realized I heard wind blowing through trees; pedestrians walking and talking; cars going by; neighbors’ voices; and other sounds to which I generally do not attend. I also realized I did not hear the hum of a clock, refrigerator, TV, VCR, DVD player. I did not go on the computer all day, so I did not hear any of its sounds. We had no way to cook, so I missed all those sounds. But I did hear the following languages spoken: English, German, and Spanish. That is not unusual where I live. What is unusual is we all sat outside in the dimming light and conversed (including listening) for hours, while we awaited the return of electricity and our routine lives. I found the descriptions of how Kuusisto listens to be fascinating. He describes his early delight, as a lonely boy, finding Caruso records in an attic. Caruso and his music continue to be a theme woven throughout the book. He also depicts what it is like to stand in a forest and listen to the sounds surround him. Kuusisto is adept at taking what many of us consider everyday sounds and exploring them in depth. The wind at a New York intersection is one such adventure. “I was working my way south on Fifth and eavesdropping as I walked…Then I was standing in the strange white noise of the west- going-to-east Hudson River wind” (p. 82). The narrative about this corner continues for the next two pages. Much of Eavesdropping revolves around travel. Kuusisto describes travels as close by as the gift of a transistor radio and as faraway from his Ohio home as Iceland, among many other journeys. Eavesdropping is in many senses a travelogue—from learning as a young boy to travel outside of his apparently unhappy home; to physical travel as a blind man in venues as diverse as a concert hall in Reykjavik to a baseball game in Boston (and others in various cities); to a diner in Texas. Along the way, Kuusisto regales us with what he hears, imagines, and supposes. Eavesdropping contains the kinds of stories that everyone wants to hear: informed, stylish, entertaining, and educational. The book belongs in libraries and at the very least in graduate programs about disability and literature.