by Oliver Sacks
El Deafo explores the elementary school trials and triumphs of a girl who loses her hearing to a fever. She must attend school with a amplifying device and a microphone which the teacher uses. Her difficulty in understanding what people are saying as she learns to lip read and her feelings about how...
The first two sections are a bit of a slog. Sacks goes into the history of educating deaf people, and he veers off all over the place into footnotes that are neither amusing nor informative. Despite that, he does manage to put the history of Sign and boarding schools for the deaf into both a histori...
“We are remarkably ignorant about deafness…Ignorant and indifferent.” I would definitely agree that I was relatively ignorant about deafness, probably because I didn’t know any deaf people until some months ago. Making the acquaintance of a young deaf man made me really curious about deaf people in ...
I enjoyed this, as I enjoy all Sacks, and it's not his best. It's light on neurology. Given its 1989 publication, it's quite out of date. It predates baby sign language and both behind-the-ear speech processors and fully implantable cochlear implants. In addition (and since I read it as an audiobook...
Seeing Voices was originally published in 1989. That was a big in-between year for the deaf. In 1988 Gallaudet students successfully pushed for a deaf president of the university. And in 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act would be signed into law.As for me, in 1989 I was three years old. I ha...
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