Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude
    The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude
    The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude
    Audiobook6 hours

    The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude

    Written by Howard Axelrod

    Narrated by Howard Axelrod

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJun 7, 2016
    ISBN9781515972952
    The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude

    Related to The Point of Vanishing

    Related audiobooks

    Biography & Memoir For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      American Guy

      Jun 28, 2023

      Be Mine By Richard Ford Bloomsbury £18.99 ‘When you're young, your opponent is the future. But when you're not young, your opponent's the past.’ Frank Bascombe came up with that fretful axiom in Independence Day (1995), the second of Richard Ford's n

      3 min read

    • Article

      30 Books in 30 Days: Lab Girl

      Mar 13, 2017

      In the 30 Books in 30 Days series  leading up to the March 16 announcement of the 2016 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Michele Filgate offers an appreciation of auto

      2 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Michael Pollan

      Dec 11, 2017

      What I get to read is not necessarily what I want to read. The post A Year in Reading: Michael Pollan appeared first on The Millions.

      1 min read

    • Article

      Jedidiah Jenkins

      Mar 25, 2021

      Jedidiah Jenkins
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Blue-collar Bard

      Jul 13, 2020

      The Blue-collar Bard
      13 min read

    • Article

      'Seeing Ghosts' Navigates The Melancholia Of Loss — Of People, Places And Identities

      Aug 25, 2021

      While this book would not exist without Kat Chow's grief — while Chow would not be the person she is now without that grief — her project here aims for more than just mapping her primal anguish.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Karl Ove Knausgaard Shows You What Makes Life Worth Living

      Sep 20, 2017

      Knausgaard doesn’t write here to understand, but to associate—to get close to truths larger than himself. The post Karl Ove Knausgaard Shows You What Makes Life Worth Living appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Best Podcasts Of The Week: The Untold Story Of The UK’s Queer Nightlife Scene

      Feb 9, 2023

      FOGO: Fear of Going OutsideWidely available, episodes weekly from Monday “How could someone claim they love nature, yet want to kill one of its creatures?” So asks reluctant naturalist Ivy Le in series two of the show that sends this city slicker int

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Natalie Bakopoulos

      Dec 8, 2020

      I felt so wrecked, so torn apart—yet somehow, miraculously, also shored back up. The post A Year in Reading: Natalie Bakopoulos appeared first on The Millions.

      13 min read

    • Article

      The Reader

      May 1, 2020

      The Reader
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Collector’s Eye

      May 4, 2021

      A Collector’s Eye
      4 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Dec 1, 2022

      Nothing is as important to our ability to survive as our ability to hurt. -Haider Warraich, The Song of Our Scars, 2022 In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. -William Blake, T

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Point of Vanishing

    3.5/5

    86 ratings36 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      I just couldn't get into this book as either a study in memoir or solitude. It's a romantic study of a guy blinded in an eye at a pick-up basketball game who then gets so depressed he goes to the wilds of Vermont for "solitude" with running water and electricity; the general store/post office is a few miles away. While there are some gorgeous metaphors and descriptive passages there is little momentum. Even David Thoreau had his bean patch and evening dinners with Emerson.
    • 4/5
      I received this book as an ARC through a LibraryThing giveaway. It doesn?t come out until September, and I?m kind of tickled to get to read it so early.

      I initially entered the running for this book because it?s out of Beacon Press and because it?s about an escape similar to that which I?ve contemplated myself on many occasions. It was mostly?but not quite?what I expected.

      For some reason, I thought it was going to be about an old guy going to the woods. I thought it would be about someone in his 60?s or maybe even 70?s, but instead Axelrod is only a few years older than I am, which I suppose some people would classify as ?old,? but it wasn?t what I had in mind.

      Then when I started reading and especially when I started to be drawn into the story, I kept worrying that maybe this guy is a jerk (only I didn?t use the word ?jerk? in my head). Ever since one of the Mean Girls from my high school published a bestselling memoir that people on Facebook keep quoting, I?ve approached memoirs with caution, worried that I might get drawn into the insights of someone who seems deep on paper but is actually not quite like that in real life.

      Axelrod grew up in one of the affluent suburbs of Boston. He went to Harvard. By his own admission, things always came pretty easily for him. He seemed a bit of a ladies? man. All of these were details that made me wonder: What did the people who weren?t his friends think of him? Did people in his high school think he was whatever the Mean Girl equivalent is for a guy? If he was or even is a jerk, does that decrease the value of his memoir?

      While I remain cautious about drawing deep spiritual lessons directly from Axelrod?s memoir, I do feel some parallels between his experience of the world and my own. The book helps me see some of the questions with which I?m perpetually grappling?about the nature of identity and the extent to which we live in the world as humans have created it rather than the world as it actually exists under the monoculture lawns and the sidewalks we drive by to get to the gym?through a different lens.

      And the book is quite well written. The language is rich and engaging. Some devices are a little obvious?like the knock on the door at the beginning that doesn?t get answered until way later in the story?but that doesn?t really diminish their effectiveness.

      I appreciate how Axelrod shows the arc of his experience and his personal growth, from the accident that made him second-guess everything to the missteps he made as he tried to fit his new situation and awareness back into his old life, and all the way through his bad times and alienation and eventual and reluctant return to the ?real world? (or at least the world in which most of us live our daily lives).

      I?ve often wondered if it?s possible, once one has lived deliberately (to invoke Thoreau, someone whose memoir I?ve so far been unable to finish because it?s so self-important) and pried away the veneer from daily life, ever to be able to return to the world everyone else calls ?home? with any semblance of belonging. With neither false self-deprecation nor overstatement of the importance of his personal experience to anyone but himself, Axelrod provides one example of how this sort of societal re-entry can happen.

      I do wonder, though, had he been more intentionally self-reflective before the accident, had he wrestled a little more with issues of identity and belonging, would he have been knocked so flat when that view of the world and his place in it shifted? As someone who feels perpetually out of place, would I handle that sort of accident and the resultant existential crisis any better? (Thinking back on crises of similar intensity in my life and how I responded to them, I would have to answer, ?probably not.?)

      And then there?s this question, always on the periphery when I read a memoir, and which especially lurked when I read this book, addressing as it does the issue of how we see ourselves compared to how others see us:

      If I wrote a memoir, how many people would say, ?Oh, I know her; she?s a self-important jerk??

      That avenue of thought generally dampens my enthusiasm for memoir-writing.
    • 3/5
      The author loses the sight in one eye as the result of an accident, and he withdraws to a cabin in Vermont for 2 years. It covers the events that lead him to house-sit in Vermont, how he adjusts, the "locals" he encounters, and then his first interaction with his family after 2 years. This took me a while to get into, and I found it somewhat slow, but I enjoyed it overall.
    • 3/5
      I always admire people who share their stories via books. Brave people no matter the topic. I enjoyed Howard's journey, and I am happy to have won this from LibraryThing.
    • 5/5
      Traumatic event in life leads to finding purpose in life, because it makes you withdraw and find yourself. The one-sentence summary of this book doesn't do it justice, though, because it is so honestly, emotionally conceived and elegantly carried out. There is a poetry to the language that made me care for the writer, and inspired me to experience the difficult emotions in my own life so I too could have greater clarity.
    • 4/5
      Axelrod takes to the woods after an accident on a basketball court casts him into an unknown trajectory during his Junior year at Harvard. Neither family, friend, or faculty assumptions for his future mesh with the world which is now viewed uniquely by Howard. His separateness makes manifest in entering a life of seeing himself head on, no filters offered outside the shards of companionship he occasionally allows and experiences in his spare moments of obtaining food or fuel. Neither precious nor endearing, Axelrod instead rings clear with a grasp of his inclinations and possibilities that he shares without apology to the reader. A fascinating glimpse for readers that reads honest.
    • 5/5
      If I could give this more stars I would. So thank you a little extra, LibraryThing Early Reviewers for this book. It was one of those rare ones that I have to sit on a few days after finishing. The way he describes the underneath of thoughts and emotions is rare, and I thoroughly enjoyed the journey. I actually feel bad I don't think I can explain properly in a review how great this book was. In the author, I saw a lot of a friend, so I'll be sending this along to him for Christmas. Much recommended!
    • 3/5
      This is a beautifully written memoir of Howard Axel rod and the two years he spends in Vermont after an eye injury that leaves him blind in one eye. I won this book from Librarything and appreciate receiving this book. The flaw, for me, is that he comes across as a little selfish and lucky to have the support of his family to hide away for two years to find himself.
    • 4/5
      The Point of Vanishing is a very beautifully written memoir, more so because it's a debut.  I was glad to have won a copy from LibraryThing  just  to experience Axelrod's  way with words; his vivid descriptions of nature and of his feelings are really done exquisitely.  But I didn't at first get the point-- of the vanishing, that is.  Why did he do what he did?  Plus, he didn't really vanish into solitude as the title suggests, but house-sat in a Vermont cabin in the woods for a couple of years.  He still saw s few people and still talked on the phone occasionally.  That's not true solitude, but it certainly gave him much time for reflection and appreciating the beauty around him, without the distractions of tv, cell phones, and computers.The "why" at first glance was the author's tragic sports accident that caused blindness in one eye during his college years. But the author said he didn't want that to change him, or others' perceptions of him. And it shouldn't have; he could still see in one eye and function pretty normally.  I don't  mean to diminish his experience; I  have had some vision issues but certainly not to this extent.  Somehow, though, the eye, and a failed romance that was perfectly interwoven with the Vermont story, did change so many things.  The more I read, the more the "why" became clearer, but I  was still confused at the end about it going on so long and to such extremes that he lost a great amount of weight and muscle  tone before finally waking up and rejoining the world.   I would recommend this and would read this author again.
    • 4/5
      The Point of Vanishing was an interesting and quite different book for me. Much of the dialogue was very poetic and the descriptions were amazing. But the plot was thin and it was sometimes difficult to wade through. I think Axelrod has a good future as an author and I look forward to seeing more from him. Perhaps he could choose a topic that would move along a bit faster and have a few more issues to deal with than " I lost the sight in one eye and that explains all my weird anti-social behavior". Stll and all, I thought it was good.
    • 4/5
      [The Point of Vanishing - a memoir of two years in solitude] by [Howard Axelrod] - This was an ER memoir that I had a bit of a struggle getting into, but once I did I thoroughly enjoyed it. As a young man, Axelrod's eye was severely injured and besides losing his sight in that eye, he suffered from extremely painful migraines and difficulty with perception. He rented a cabin far in the woods away from most civilization and spent two years there - trying to find a sense of himself in his new reality.
    • 3/5
      In this memoir of privilege undercut by accident and self-imposed isolation, Howard Axelrod has a steep hill to climb. He makes it over some pleasing narrative passages and down the other side, but not without risking losing his readers midway. Stories of withdrawal from society still need characters, if only as foils, and throughout the main portion of the book, in sections alternating with solitary observation, Axelrod supplies several: the Italian girlfriend who got away, his parents and some extended family, friends from Harvard, and people closer to him in the Vermont woods — the snowplow driver and his son, a mother and daughter from a local restaurant. The problem is that this seems a little formulaic: none of these individuals feels fully realized, and some — his friends — I kept mixing up. Axelrod's reflections on altered vision are well worth reading, if sometimes hard to follow. But there is so little sense of a unique perspective presented prior to his accident that his searching and suffering read only against the Harvard "golden boy" background, which makes it more difficult to empathize. Frankly, mired in the story of his ill-fated romance, I wouldn't have finished this book had it not been for the sake of this review. I'm glad I pushed through, though, as the section in which he visits his family at Thanksgiving throws him into some of the most interesting interactions in the book, when it becomes clear just how far he has strayed, without being aware of it, from the norms of our society — or, well, some section of it.
    • 5/5
      When the author loses the sight in one eye due to a sporting accident, he seeks to find himself, going through a lost love and a deep depression. This book chronicles through his period of isolation simultaneous with the time leading up to it. He writes fine literature! Besides a very introspective, interesting memoir, his description and his writing is spectacular. I am glad he rejoined society! I hope he writes more. I did not give him five stars because it took me a couple dozen pages to see the rhythm of the memoir.
    • 4/5
      Howad Axelrod, tells the story of his self imposed stay in the woods of Vermont to try to discover his sense of himself after a painful love affair ends and after he loses one of his eyes in a basketball incident. How to really see and be aware is a continuing theme. The writing is beautiful and I often identified with Howard's yearning for solitude and not having to deal with the vicissitudes of life, but Howard eventually decides that nature and solitude are not enough. Yes, Howard's isolation was self indulgent at times, but I thought he had a true sense that solitude is what he needed to come out of his confusion at how his life had turned out. He eventually comes to this understanding. "...that while I wasn't only who I was to other people, without other people it would be nearly impossible to get down to what else I might be. These woods had given me a second chance, a a way to learn to see again..."
    • 2/5
      I was drawn to this book because of the idea of living alone in nature. Howard Axelrod loses the vision in one eye and seems to become unmoored. He retreats to a cabin in the Vermont woods but it wasn't actually solitude. He talked to his family by phone,went into town once a week for supplies, visited a diner and talked to the owner and her daughter. It was a quiet life but not solitude. At times the writing is very good especially as he describes the sounds and sights on his solo walks. But ultimately, I found the book could not hold my interest. He seemed to be feeling sorry for himself and not really on a path of discovery.
    • 3/5
      Harvard graduate Howard Axelrod describes his slow-motion nervous collapse, which culminated in his decision to spend two years living alone in a remote Vermont cabin, in his memoir The Point of Vanishing.Axelrod's troubles officially began when a freak accident on a basketball court resulted in his losing the vision in one eye. His post-graduation jaunt to Italy and an unhappy love affair with a European woman didn't help matters any. Axelrod had been feeling rather aimless even prior to the accident and the doomed relationship, but these things increased his sense of disorientation. So he narrowed his world down to a small, decrepit cabin in the woods where his only regular human contact was with the man who plowed him out after snowstorms and the lady who ran the local diner. He reports that during this period of his life he took lots of walks in the woods on his snowshoes, read a lot of books (he doesn't indicate which ones) and wrote stacks of poetry (although he doesn't include any of his poetic output).When he finally emerged from his self-imposed isolation (and two years of avoiding mirrors) for a family Thanksgiving dinner, his cousins thought he resembled the Unabomber. I don't think that it too much of a spoiler to reveal that eventually he made his way back to a more conventional lifestyle.There is some good writing here; Axelrod has some lovely things to say about chickadees, for example, but overall this memoir is vague and slow-moving. It's not a bad book, but more narrative momentum could have made it so much better.
    • 4/5
      THE POINT OF VANISHING: A MEMOIR OF TWO YEARS IN SOLITUDE, by Howard Axelrod.First of all, subtitle notwithstanding, this book has nothing to do with prison time. Nothing whatsoever. Quite the contrary. Howard Axelrod is the product of a privileged upbringing, an attorney's son - "a kid from Brookline" - who attended Roxbury Latin and then Harvard. Toward the end of his Harvard years he was seriously injured in a pickup basketball game which left him blind in one eye.He graduated from Harvard and was awarded a Rockefeller grant which financed a year abroad, in Italy, where he engaged in a torrid affair with a German girl who was, sadly, engaged to another.Axelrod's memoir milks the partial blindness angle, emphasizing how his injury is a life-changing one, that his new monocular vision forces a number of difficult adjustments. His hearing becomes more acute; his depth perception is damaged. But, perhaps more than anything else, his self-image seems to be permanently skewed. After a few trips around the country, apparently searching for answers to vague cosmic questions and engaging guiltily in casual affairs, Axelrod withdraws to a remote ramshackle house in the woods of northern Vermont - in the Northeast Kingdom. And this is where he spends his "two years in solitude," as he calls it, a time of navel-gazing, self-pity, and maybe even a bit of suicidal, clinical depression. The experience is heavily romanticized. In reality, it is not really solitude, as he admits going to a movie, into town for groceries and an occasional pizza, interacting with the eccentric British woman who owns and runs the café with her daughter, as well as the guy who plows his road.In case it's not obvious, I had a difficult time relating to Axelrod - one, because of his privileged upbringing and educational opportunities; and two, because he seemed to me to be simply wallowing in self-pity, mooning around his woodsy retreat, rambling in the woods, writing poems, naively dreaming: "And, perhaps, I could eventually turn them into a book, could use the money I earned to keep living here, to make the way of living into my way of life."Money earned from writing POETRY? Huh? Sounds definitely delusional. A couple of Axelrod's friends liken him to Thoreau ("living deliberately beneath the pines") and Bob Dylan ("how does it feel/to be on your own/with no direction home"). I don't think so. Although I do like Dylan, I was never able to really get excited over WALDEN. And this book, although the author does write well, had a similar affect on me. I thought instead of SEINFELD, which was, as Jerry himself said, a show "about nothing."But there are some very good things here too, passages that dug a little deeper, that hit home. For example, I was very moved by Axelrod's description of his mother, who, upon the death of her father, remembered an earlier time -"A few years earlier, after my grandfather's funeral, Mom had told me something Poppa had said to her when his own father had died. He'd been knotting his tie in his bedroom before the funeral ... He was soft-spoken, my Poppa, a man with a natural kindness that generally sheltered him and everyone he loved. But there was something different, something bereft in his eyes. When Mom sat down next to him on the bed, he said, 'Now I know what forever means.' ... And I suppose it was the first time I knew, really knew, that my mother would die. Her father had passed on that 'forever' to her, and someday she would pass on that 'forever' to me."My own mother has been gone now for over two years, but these words struck a nerve. 'Forever' can indeed be a very sad word. In another passage Axelrod remember how his mother told how, as a child, she'd fallen off some cement steps and hit her head, then how she'd show him "the small bump just below her hairline, and she'd take my hand and run my fingers over it so I could feel it. It always astounded me ... feeling time right there under my fingertips, the way something that had happened decades ago was still a part of Mom's face, still a part of who she was."A small detail, but one that so many, many people will relate to, because they too have felt such scars, every one of which has its own story.THE POINT OF VANISHING is meant to be a book about blindness and seeing - or not seeing. As such I think it only partially succeeds. The pain, the suffering, they don't really seem to resonate here, given Axelrod's advantages. The angst though, that does come through. I'm not sure it's sufficient, however, to carry a whole book. In the end, I think Axelrod is a very good writer. He just needs a subject more worthy of his talent. I hope he finds one. I will recommend this book, but with the reservations already noted.
    • 1/5
      I received a copy of Howard Axelrod's "The Point of Vanishing" from LT's Early Reviewers program. It was a book I found both boring and infuriating. Axelrod, a privileged guy attending Harvard loses the sight in one of his eyes at a pickup basketball game. He seems to feel this is incredibly tragic and seems to have massive trouble adjusting to this... despite the fact, he can still read, drive and uh, see. (I have a friend who became blind as an adult and is off climbing Kilimanjaro at this moment... it's hard to muster up a ton of sympathy for Axelrod here.) I get he had to make a huge adjustment in his life, but it seems like whatever life goals he set were still pretty achievable. He moves to a cabin in Vermont, which has water, electricity and phone service.... he drives out to the grocery store every couple of weeks. In Axelrod's upper class world, this is pretty remarkable, I suppose. Here, we just call that winter. I will say Axelrod can write... but his story is not all that interesting nor worthy of a memoir.
    • 4/5
      I picked this book for two reasons: I like nature memoirs, and I am interested in the psychology of disability and vision loss. I pretty much liked this book. Axelrod has an interesting and compelling story. But let me just say straight up: this is not a nature memoir. Axelrod is no Annie Dillard, nature is part of his story, but it's a minor character. Axelrod was a junior at Harvard when a freak basketball accident severed his optic nerve and left him with no vision in one eye. Axelrod had been a high achieving student, who felt that he also had a more sensitive and introspective side that he did not share much. After the accident; his feeling of disconnect between his true self and the self that others saw, grew. He graduated, and spent time in Italy, but within a few years, felt at odds with himself and the world.He ended up spending 2 years in an isolated part of Vermont, basically isolating himself from the world. (although he continued to have some contact with family, and regular shopping trips,) It's not a spoiler to say that at the end of this time, he was able to move on, though perhaps not on the path that had been planned for him.The book moves back and forth in time quite a bit, between his time in Vermont, and his life before. At times I found that confusing, but other than that, I felt the writing was good and I enjoyed reading the book.
    • 3/5
      I don't often read memoirs, but this one sounded interesting. I was particularly drawn to the idea of someone isolating with nature--and in the beautiful woods of Vermont, no less--to gain insight and wisdom. Howie Axelrod seemed to have everything: loving parents, good friends, a scholarship to travel in Italy, a talent for writing, and he was about to enter his senior year at Harvard. But a freak accident during a pick-up game of basketball left him blind in one eye, and his world changed. As a lot of people (including, I think, myself) would do, Howie puts on a stoic, "I'm fine" face in public. But his descriptions of adjusting to the blindness tell another story. For one thing, he has lost all sense of depth perception--which, in turn, leads him to start feeling awkward around other people, even family. He retreats to a house far out in the Vermont woods for two years in an effort to find himself, feel comfortable with his body, search for meaning.I was captivated by the first third of the book, but then I started to get bored. This is not Henry David Thoreau. For one thing, Howie doesn't REALLY isolate: he has phone access and speaks with family and friends fairly often; he has Nat, who comes to remove the snow; he goes into town to shop and have lunch at a diner, where he meets and befriends the British owner and her teenaged daughter; he goes home for Thanksgiving. (One of the things he learns is that he really needs other people.) And the "into nature" plot is fairly skimpy. He meditates on snails, then feels triumphant when he crushes an especially large one with his bicycle. He watches chickadees, but not so much for their beauty and habits as for the way he perceives their shadows.And I really found the idealized descriptions of his Italian girlfriend annoying. These parts of the book really highlighted the adolescent self-absorption that other readers have noted.The book might appeal more to regular readers of memoirs or to those with more interest in coming-of-age stories. And that's not me.
    • 5/5
      I could not put this down once I started. Beautifully written -- so full of emotional upheaval that, in many ways, is all too familiar as a means of reaching adulthood but perhaps not quite to the depth that Axelrod experiences. Howard Axelrod shares what being human is at its core and he lets us see inside his thinking in nearly gripping experiences-- explaining loneliness in a deep and what becomes, for me, a rewarding way. Going back and forth between the present and what led up to his time in the woods provided a fascinating and detailed picture of his life.
    • 4/5
      I thought this book was very well written. It touched a part of me that I have never shared.. the occasional longing to escape and be alone. I look forward to reading more by Howard Axelrod.
    • 3/5
      I don't think this book was about complete solitude as I thought coming into it, but I like reading memoirs and have never really met one I couldn't learn something from.
    • 1/5
      I picked up this book because I have read many other works by individuals who have gone to nature to figure out something about themselves. This one fell far short of the best in the genre. I found Howie to be exactly the sort of conceited, self-absorbed, narcissistic jerk that people would imagine as a dark caricature of a student who attends that small college in Cambridge that no one has ever heard of. I was unable to make any emotional connection with Howie, and therefore had little interest in his story. At first, this was just due to a vague feeling of uneasiness, but then details started to confirm my suspicions. At the beginning of the third chapter, he writes a good deal about snails, and how he admires them. It's a meditation on snails. A few paragraphs later, he gleefully runs one over on his bicycle, and he clearly has no regrets about killing it. So much for the subject of his admiration.Similarly, his cabin in Vermont is owned by an older man named Lev. Lev has instructions for Howie on things Howie needed to tend to while he lived at the cabin. The instructions were quite detailed, and Howie decided that he wasn't going to pay attention to them, and he threw the instructions in the woodstove. It's sad enough that he decided that he wasn't going to follow the instructions, considering Lev's generosity in letting him use the cabin. But throwing the instructions in the fire just demonstrates that Howie is not only ungrateful, but vindictive. He could have just left the instructions in a drawer.There doesn't seem to be much redemption in Howie's story, either. Maybe I wanted some other story altogether, but Howie doesn't really connect with nature and learn some deep things about himself. Instead, he suffers by not taking adequate care of himself, and that is the focus of the story - most everything that is trying about his experience is due to his own choices. He also doesn't appear to have any sympathy for others he meets in Vermont; instead, he has a very judgmental attitude about them, as though these adorable little peons are ants in his ant farm.I didn't find his descriptions of nature, nor of his relationships, to be particularly compelling. I am sorry that he suffered the injury he did, but I don't think that he learned anything. At least, not something worth writing about. Part of me feels like someone said, "Hey, sorry about what happened to you - you should write a book about it!" That's not really enough of a motivation for writing.In all, I found this book to be rather pathetic, and like Howie did with Lev's instructions, I'll consign my copy to the flames.
    • 3/5
      The Point of Vanishing is one man's tale of how he deals with a life changing event. No one can prepare you for how you will react to a traumatic event. In this story, we learn how one young man does just that. His entire life seems to come undone, and instead of trying to rebuild it exactly as it was before, he takes a different route. He learns that he will not be the same person he once was, and that's ok. We do not have to mold ourselves into the person others believe us to be. However, we should not always expect others to understand how we have changed either. I enjoyed the calmness of this story, the descriptions of the woods and life within it were vivid and well written. For some reason, I had a hard time developing an attachment for the narrator. Maybe that says more about me than it does about the book, but I missed an emotional connection with this story. Perhaps if I had read it at a different point in my life it would have hit the mark for me. If you want a beautifully written account of being lost in life and found in solitude, you will probably enjoy this book. I think Ill hold on to this one and read it again in few years to see if it affects me differently later in life.
    • 4/5
      Howard (Howie) Axelrod was a Harvard student who had the optic nerve of his right eye severed during a pick up basketball game. The loss of vision was more devastating than he would initially admit, to himself or others. Ultimately he chose isolation, travelling first to Italy as part of a special study abroad program (where he fell into a brief but passionate romance), and then to a cabin in the woods in a remote area of northern Vermont. This memoir is primarily set in that cabin, where, not unlike Thoreau, Axelrod was motivated to live deliberately, but also to escape society and uncover the basic and fundamental core of living. Or as he puts it, "I needed to live without the need of putting on a face for anyone, including myself…Beneath all the masks I’d accumulated over the years.there had to be something there, something essential, some sense of reality and of myself that couldn’t be broken."The Point of Vanishing is a profound meditation on the self: on space and silence, on connections between the self and other. Axelrod eschews most day to day details in favor of poetic observations he makes on his many walks in the woods. His style is simple and completely absorbing, as when he describes silence, or the psychic pain of losing connection, or the onset of a snowstorm, or nature’s return to Spring . And then there is his own return to his family, awkward and dissonant. His introspection, honesty and sheer descriptive power all resonate to such a degree that I was left stunned and in sheer wonder. This memoir will leave you pondering your own relationship with yourself and the world, with silence, and what it is to truly see.
    • 3/5
      This is a well written memoir of a troubled young man. I do wonder after reading this, and Into the Wild (Krakauer), Wild (Strayed), The Other (Guterson, sorry fiction, but still on the list), how many more stories of this type there are that never get told, and how many youth have a sadder or tragic ending to their coming of age wilderness adventure. I have to say, everything about this book was great, yet it didn’t grab me emotionally. I should have been able to relate—and yes I could: having loved the woods, spent a while trying to figure out what was “wrong” with me, lived alone in a cabin for a summer, was academically successful at a private college (though not Harvard), yada, yada…but really, maybe I’m too old to feel sympathy for the luxury of being able to go off and do nothing. I knew I always had the safety net of parental support, as, I believe, did the author (despite talking about running out of money). While I appreciated the depth of the author’s experience, even empathize, somehow I couldn’t get the sympathy going for a personal connection.If you like this genre, it’s a worthy read. But that being said, there are better stories out there. 2 1/2 out of 5 stars.
    • 4/5
      The story of Axelrod's unusual accident and subsequent disassociation from modern society is poignant and soulful, the scientific tidbits about the human optic nerve are well-placed and extremely interesting, the descriptions of the New England forest engaging and beautifully wrought, and his account of his time and relationship in Bologna is exceptionally lovely. The shortcoming with this book isn't in the writing, but in the marketing. Spoiler Alert: This is not a tale of a modern Thoreau or a person surviving in true solitude--this is a tale of a young, intelligent, depressed/nearly suicidal man in existential crisis after a traumatic event. Affluent New Englanders attending Harvard as English majors may view his rustic Vermont experience as a wilderness tale, but a man that goes to the market weekly to get groceries, stops into the local café occasionally, talks to people on the phone monthly, has his drive snowplowed by a neighbor so he can get his Honda out, and goes home on Thanksgiving because his Mom told him to is not truly in remote solitude. I don't discount the importance or quality of his account, I just believe his work would be better served by sales descriptions that don't leave readers/purchasers feeling they were misled about the content. Bottom Line: Worth the read, even if it isn't quite what you may have expected.
    • 3/5
      This book is about white kid problems. A young, privileged white man has an accident, and laments over his circumstances. I was really looking forward to this book, and learning about how the author lived alone for 2 years in the woods... but the story seemed to gravitate more towards the author feeling sorry for himself.
    • 4/5
      I don't usually gravitate toward memoirs, but I really enjoyed this one. The author describes not only his 2 years living alone in a house in the woods, but what led him there and what led him out. I love his writing style. His descriptions are often beautiful and thought provoking. I love reading descriptions of the natural world and there were plenty in this book. I also identified with him on some level and that enhanced the story for me. I love how he doesn't seem to hold much back when describing this time of his life. He is very honest about the positive and negative aspects of his undertaking. I also liked that he didn't try and sugarcoat or exaggerate any generic "lessons" he learned while living out there. He took plenty away from it, but it was not anything you can fit neatly into a couple of sentences at the end. I would recommend this book to anyone.