Quick Take
- Narration: Doug Ordunio handles Robert Kurson’s narrative nonfiction style with steady competence, maintaining the book’s pacing through its more philosophically dense passages about the neuroscience of vision.
- Themes: vision and perception, identity under transformation, the costs of gaining what you thought you wanted
- Mood: Intellectually thrilling and quietly unsettling
- Verdict: Kurson applies the same deep reporting that made Shadow Divers essential reading to a story that is ultimately more interior and philosophically destabilizing than it first appears.
I came to Crashing Through already knowing Robert Kurson from Shadow Divers, his account of the amateur divers who discovered a WWII German submarine off the coast of New Jersey. That book is one of the best narrative nonfiction works of the past twenty years, and it set an expectation for this one that is mostly, though not entirely, fulfilled. Crashing Through is a stranger book than Shadow Divers, and stranger in the best possible sense: it begins as an adventure story about a man who regained his sight after a lifetime of blindness and becomes something closer to a philosophical investigation of what vision actually is and whether getting what you think you want might cost you more than you can anticipate.
Mike May has been blind since age three. In the decades that followed, he broke world records in downhill speed skiing, worked for the CIA, became an entrepreneur and inventor, and built a full and clearly joyful life. He had, by his own account, never particularly missed vision. Then, in 1999, a stem cell transplant surgery was identified that could potentially restore his sight. May began to ask the questions the synopsis captures so precisely: Would music still sound the same? Would he still be Mike May?
The Neuroscience of Seeing for the First Time
Kurson does something genuinely rare in accessible nonfiction: he makes the neuroscience of vision gripping. The brain’s capacity to process visual information is not something that simply activates after years of disuse. May’s case, like fewer than twenty documented cases before him, forced scientists and doctors to confront how much of what we call sight is actually interpretation, pattern recognition, learned association built up over years of experience that May had simply never had. His post-surgery experience of vision, confusing, overwhelming, fundamentally different from how sighted people understand it, is one of the book’s most fascinating and most unsettling sections.
The questions May faced about whether to proceed with the surgery are rendered with real moral weight. He had a functioning life. He had a marriage, children, a career, a sense of self built around navigating the world without sight. The surgery promised to change all of that, not by solving a problem but by introducing a new dimension that might be as disruptive as it was enriching. Kurson’s reporting makes clear that the stakes were genuinely existential, not merely medical.
Adventure Story as Identity Examination
Crashing Through is subtler than the adventure-memoir framing suggests. The speed skiing records and CIA work establish May as someone for whom risk is a natural state, which makes his hesitation about the surgery more meaningful rather than less. He’s not afraid of risk. He’s afraid of losing himself. That distinction is what lifts the book above the standard medical-miracle narrative arc.
Kurson is a deeply skilled scene-builder, and those skills are on display throughout. The surgery itself, the immediate aftermath, the gradual discovery of what May could and couldn’t do with his new visual capacity, are rendered with the same present-tense tension he brought to the submarine sequences in Shadow Divers. His reporting access was clearly extensive, and the book benefits from the intimacy it achieves with May and his family over years of telling this story.
What Doug Ordunio Brings to the Narration
Ordunio is a reliable presence in audiobook narration, and he serves Crashing Through well. The book has two speeds: the page-turning adventure energy of Kurson’s scene-setting and the slower, more contemplative register of the neuroscience and philosophical reflection. Ordunio navigates both without calling attention to the shift, which is the right approach for this material. The audiobook’s ten-plus hours feel appropriate to the depth of the story rather than excessive.
Who Should Listen and Who Might Want to Skip
Listen if you enjoyed Shadow Divers and want to see Kurson apply his skills to interior rather than physical adventure. This is an excellent choice for anyone interested in the neuroscience of perception, the philosophy of identity and change, or disability memoir that is as scientifically curious as it is personally compelling. Skip if you’re looking for a straightforward inspirational narrative; Crashing Through is more ambivalent and philosophically unsettled than the genre usually permits, and that’s what makes it worth the time.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to have read Shadow Divers before picking up Crashing Through?
No. The books are unrelated in subject and stand entirely alone. Familiarity with Kurson’s work sets expectations for his deep-reporting style and scene-building ability, but Crashing Through is fully accessible as an entry point to his nonfiction.
How much neuroscience does the book cover, and is it accessible to general listeners?
Substantial neuroscience is woven through the narrative, focused on how the brain processes visual information and what happens when that capacity is absent or newly introduced. Kurson makes it entirely accessible without dumbing it down, which is one of his consistent strengths as a nonfiction writer.
Did Mike May’s surgery ultimately improve his life?
The book resists a simple answer, which is one of its virtues. May gained visual capacity that was real but different from how sighted people experience vision. Whether that gain was worth the disruption to his existing way of being in the world is something May himself seems to hold as an open question, and Kurson doesn’t resolve it artificially.
Is Crashing Through appropriate for listeners who are themselves blind or have visual impairments?
Yes, with the caveat that May’s experience is very specific: someone who was sighted briefly as a young child and then blind for decades. His post-surgery experience is meaningfully different from someone who has been blind from birth or someone with recent vision loss. The book is thoughtful about those distinctions.
