Fascinating look at deafness and language: I loved this book and could have wished it twice as long. However, a friend to whom I recommended the book didn't think that highly of it. So to be honest, I guess this book isn't for everyone. It is true that particularly in this book, Sacks gets carried away by lots of long footnotes printed at the bottom of the pages. For me, reading them was like exploring every nook and cranny of a great cathedral. Absolutely enthralling. But for others, it may prove to be rather distracting. If you have ever pondered the endlessly fascinating relationship of language to thinking, you will like this book.

In 1985, Dr. Sacks was asked to write a review of When the Mind Hears, by Harlan Lane, a history of the deaf. He knew next to nothing about the subject. When he set out to educate himself, he learned that there was a brief "golden age" for education of the deaf. The Abbé de l’Epée started a school in 1755, in France, and introduced a language that combined French rules of grammar with a sign language that the urban poor deaf had developed. He trained a number of teachers, including Laurent Clerc, who brought de l'Epée's sign language to the United States and, with Thomas Gallaudet, set up the progressive American Asylum for the Deaf in Hartford in 1817.

But this program got derailed. American progressive reformers - Samuel Gridley Howe, Horace Mann, and especially Alexander Graham Bell - advocated "oralism," considering sign language to be "old-fashioned." This put deaf teachers out of work, as only hearing teachers were able to teach in the oralist method. For all practical purposes, sign language was suppressed as a pedagogical tool; something called "Signed English" was developed as a sort of compromise. Signed English is a hybrid language; it contains signs for phonetic English sounds as well as some Sign Language components, and is famously difficult for both the hearing and the deaf.

The second of the three parts explores the nature of language. To Dr. Sacks, Sign (a term he uses to encompass all sign languages that aren't hybrids) is very different from any spoken language in that it has a spatial component, but fulfills all of Chomsky's grammatical requirements; it has a remarkable internal consistency. He notes that deaf people who are taught Signed English tend to develop a number of Sign gestures on their own, and that deaf people from different cultures often are able to understand one another quickly; indigenous Signs have a remarkably consistent "spatial grammar." Serious academic study of Sign was suppressed in the late 19th century and, surprisingly, only reemerged in the 1950s.

The last part is a narrative of a seven-day protest at Gallaudet University in 1988, when a newly appointed hearing president was forced to resign and was replaced by a deaf professor.

This was a difficult book in places; the second section delved deeply into linguistic philosophy and lost me in a few places. Also, the book is very heavily footnoted; sometimes, the footnotes take up more than half the page. They are often fascinating, but tended to fracture the narrative in what was already intellectually challenging reading. Still, Dr. Sacks's characteristic empathy is always in evidence, and Seeing Voices was ultimately a very rewarding experience. ( )

good as always with mr. sacks ( )

http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/1... ( )