NONFICTION - Oct. 3, 1993

SECOND SIGHT by Robert V. Hine (University of California: $20; 203 pp.) Robert Hine was warned at age twenty that he would eventually become blind. Already saddled with a crippling case of rheumatoid arthritis, he also developed an eye condition called iridocyclitis. His doctors recommended that he move to a high altitude, start learning braille and take mobility training. Hine did all that and more. He went to graduate school at Yale, got a Ph.D. in history, and a job teaching at the newly opened Riverside campus of the University of California. By 1972, at age 51, he had only vague light perception in both eyes, officially joining the roughly 750,000 blind people in this country. He found, as puts it, “his own ways of seeing.” “The data were being chosen for me,” he says at another point. “I was not in control.” For a man so productive, so driven, so well organized and dutiful this would seem to have been an immense frustration. But, as Hine writes, his love of order and routine served him well in blindness. And, contrary to his own fears, it did not compromise his creativity. During his fifteen years of blindness, Hine wrote three books, some articles, and over twenty book reviews for scholarly journals. In April of 1986, Hine underwent the first in a series of surgical procedures that gave him back his sight. On returning home from the first successful operation, Hine writes, “I became a child again. . . On that day I was the lord of childhood and the critic of nothing.”