Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf - Hardcover

Sacks, Oliver

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520060830 ISBN 13: 9780520060838

Publisher: University of California Press, 1989

Synopsis

Oliver Sacks has been described (by The New York Times Book Review) as "one of the great clinical writers of the 20th century," and his books, including the medical classics Migraine and Awakenings, have been widely praised by critics from W. H. Auden to Harold Pinter to Doris Lessing. In his last book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Dr. Sacks undertook a fascinating journey into the world of the neurologically impaired, an exploration that Noel Perrin in the Chicago Sun-Times called "wise, compassionate, and very literate . . . the kind that restore(s) one's faith in humanity."

Now, with Seeing Voices, Dr. Sacks takes us into the world of the deaf, a world he explores with the same passion and insight that have illuminated other human conditions for his readers everywhere. Seeing Voices is a journey: a journey first into the history of deaf people, the (often outrageous) ways in which they were seen and treated in the past, and the new understanding that started to dawn in the eighteenth century; and a journey into the present situation of the deaf—a situation which, all too often, is still one of misunderstanding and mistreatment.

Dr. Sacks writes of how he has come to see deaf people "in a new light, as a people, with a distinctive language, sensibility, and culture of their own." Indeed, it is only in the last ten years that the extraordinary and beautiful visual-gestural language of the deaf—Sign—has been fully recognized as a language, as linguistically complete, rich, and expressive as any spoken language, a language with its own distinctive basis in the brain. The one overwhelming peril for the deaf is to be kept from achieving language competence of any kind, to be denied access to both Sign and speech, and that tragedy is completely preventable by early exposure to Sign.

Sign is also social and cultural. It lies at the heart of the many manifestions of "deaf consciousness" in the past twenty years, among them the remarkable uprising of the deaf students at Gallaudet University in 1988. The revolt gained international attention and showed the world decisively that deaf people have "come of age" and no longer want to be treated as "disabled." Dr. Sacks gives a vivid personal account of the revolt and ponders its implications for the future. All his encounters in the course of this exhilarating journey raise issues of surprising depth and richness which, though of paramount interest to deaf people and all concerned with them, also extend powerfully to the human condition in general.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

"This book will shake your preconceptions about the deaf, about language and about thought--. Sacks [is] one of the finest and most thoughtful writers of our time."--"Los Angeles Times Book Review
Like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, this is a fascinating voyage into a strange and wonderful land, a provocative meditation on communication, biology, adaptation, and culture. In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks turns his attention to the subject of deafness, and the result is a deeply felt portrait of a minority struggling for recognition and respect--a minority with its own rich, sometimes astonishing, culture and unique visual language, an extraordinary mode of communication that tells us much about the basis of language in hearing people as well. Seeing Voices is, as Studs Terkel has written, "an exquisite, as well as revelatory, work."

About the Author:

Dr. Oliver Sacks was born in London in 1933 and was educated in London, Oxford, California, and New York. His concern has always been with individuals, as they cope with extraordinary neurological difficulties, and lately this concern has widened to embrace communities, such as the deaf, and their collective and creative adaptations to biological predicaments. Dr. Sacks lives in New York, where he is Professor of Neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0520060830
• ISBN 13: 9780520060838
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 180