Seeing Voices (original 1989; edition 2000)

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 Given its 1989 publication, it's quite out of date.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, I can't easily double-check this), Sacks makes two errors of a sort I don't usually see from him. First, he treats Kaspar Hauser is a viable example of late language attainment. I believe that by the time he was writing, it was reasonably well-agreed that Hauser was a fraud. Second, he seems to believe that the "dumb" of "deaf and dumb" refers to intellect, when a cursory look at etymology shows that this is incorrect. "Dumb" means "silent" in this context ("dumbwaiter," "struck dumb").

Sacks provides an interesting history of education for the deaf (or lack thereof), the development of sign, and the cultural and political struggles around sign. I found the third section, on the 1988 student protests at Gallaudet University, most interesting, probably because I remember it well.

Edited to add: The reader on the Audible version only reads some of the footnotes. To see them all, you'll need to use Google Books or a hard copy. ( )

First of all I have to mention the footnotes. They are extensive and take up half the page in some instances. This was very distracting, and I felt almost as if I were reading two books at once.

There were several things here that struck me. I picked up the book as sign language has always interested me, more so after working my last job, where some of the children were not able to hear, and some unable to speak in other ways. This book was interesting and informative and a very quick read.

There was mention early on how one young man, who had lost his hearing after seven years. He would hear the voice of his mother in his head even after his hearing was gone. This made me think of how I and possibly you, do this with books. I hear the voices of well known and loved characters in my head as I read. This was defined by the author as an "illusory" type of hearing.

This book explores the options given to the patents of non hearing children as far as signing and lip reading are concerned. There is mention of how som who live in the deaf community choose to Live without trying any extreme measures to give them at least some hearing. I think this is a perfectly good choice for an adult to make.
For an adult to make it for a child, at least as far as not exposing them to different learning settings and options, is in my opinion a mistake. All of us have ways of learning that suit us better than others, and when it comes to parents of a child who faces difficulty from the outset, the choices must be quite stressful. Finding what works best for your child can be difficult without any added obstacles.

We have all heard the horror stories from the past where of children grew to adulthood having been labeled as "slow" or "feeble minded" or worse, when their only issue was lack of hearing, and thus lack of ability to communicate. I have no reason to believe that things have changed enough over the years to keep this from happening now.

My reason for reading this book is that there was a girl I will call V in the classroom where I worked. She was brought in as a 4 year old who had not had any prior intervention, aside from the implantation of a cochlear implant. There was little training for her after the initial few weeks, as she didn't seem to like having the magnet near her head. I believe that if she had been sent to an appropriate school where profoundly deaf children were top priority and the the staff was trained and equipped for that particular challenge, her chances of acieving some learning would have been much better.

At one point she was taken out of school for three years, with no intervention or teaching at all, and then sent back to the same place. By that time she was an adolescent trapped in a world of silence and low vision. I read this book because of her and because I always believed that she would have been capable of so much more, were she given the chance. What I read affirmed that belief for me. ( )

Deafness and sign language are used in this book to comment on language, culture and humanity. A very interesting read, even when you're not particularly interested in deafness in itself. ( )

Never met a Sacks I didn't like - this one is no exception, although I really wish the extensive notes had been footnoted and not crammed at the end like an unusually important epilogue. Quite a bit here that I knew about (had a few friends, Deaf and hearing both, who were part of the Deaf community growing up), but much that I didn't. One interesting/heartbreaking bit? How Sign was initially adopted and then abandoned until recently. Best stuff? The examination of the linguistics and neurology of Sign - very cool. ( )

Nice, generalized primer on the consequences of deafness. I was particularly interested in Sacks' observation that sign (ASL rather than signed English) was very good at spacial descriptions, one of the weaknesses of spoken language.