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Thursday, January 23, 2014

Talking Book Review



The First Lady of The Seeing Eye by Morris Frank and Blake Clark

Happy New Year readers! I hope that you all had a wonderful holiday season and are ready to continue with reading great books in 2014!

The First Lady of The Seeing Eye by Morris Frank and Blake Clark is the book of the week for this week. Morris Frank was a blind man from Nashville who helped start the first school that trained seeing eye dogs. His dog Buddy is considered to be the first seeing eye dog in America. This amazing story started in November 1927, when Morris Frank was a 20-year-old student at Vanderbilt University and a man very unhappy about his dependency on others to get around. Frank's father read him an article by Dorothy Eustis, a woman living in Switzerland who had seen shepherds training dogs to lead blind people get around. Excited by the idea, Frank wrote a letter to Eustis and received a response letter 30 days later inviting him to come see for himself. Frank then took a ship to Europe and trained extensively with a dog that had been bred specifically to lead a blind person. The training was hard, but after weeks with the dog, Frank could get around the nearby Swiss village holding tightly to a harness to which Buddy was strapped.

I’m not about to give away the rest of this amazing story. To find out more about Morris Frank and Buddy please consider reading this book…it will inspire you and give you adequate knowledge about one of the most prominent Guide Dog schools in the country.

Happy reading until next week!!

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