Shouting Won't Help: Why I--and 50 Million Other Americans--Can't Hear You - Hardcover

Bouton, Katherine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374263043 ISBN 13: 9780374263041

Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books, 2013

Synopsis

For twenty-two years, Katherine Bouton had a secret that grew harder to keep every day. An editor at The New York Times, at daily editorial meetings she couldn't hear what her colleagues were saying. She had gone profoundly deaf in her left ear; her right was getting worse. As she once put it, she was "the kind of person who might have used an ear trumpet in the nineteenth century."

Audiologists agree that we're experiencing a national epidemic of hearing impairment. At present, 50 million Americans suffer some degree of hearing loss―17 percent of the population. And hearing loss is not exclusively a product of growing old. The usual onset is between the ages of nineteen and forty-four, and in many cases the cause is unknown.

Shouting Won't Help is a deftly written, deeply felt look at a widespread and misunderstood phenomenon. In the style of Jerome Groopman and Atul Gawande, and using her experience as a guide, Bouton examines the problem personally, psychologically, and physiologically. She speaks with doctors, audiologists, and neurobiologists, and with a variety of people afflicted with midlife hearing loss, braiding their stories with her own to illuminate the startling effects of the condition.

The result is a surprisingly engaging account of what it's like to live with an invisible disability―and a robust prescription for our nation's increasing problem with deafness.
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013

About this title

About the Author

Katherine Bouton is a former editor at The New York Times, where she worked for The New York Times Magazine and The New York Times Book Review, as well as the daily Science and Culture desks. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and many other magazines and reviews. She is currently a regular reviewer and contributor to Tuesday's Science Times section. She lives in New York City with her husband, Daniel Menaker. They have two grown children.

Reviews

*Starred Review* According to the latest statistics, 48 million Americans, or a whopping 17 percent of the population, have some kind of hearing loss. Bouton, a former senior editor at the New York Times, is one of those people. In her compelling memoir, she chronicles her own progressive loss over the decades, from a partial decline in her left ear at 30 to eventual complete loss. Hearing loss, she says, follows the traditional stages of grief: denial, anger, depression, and, finally, a reluctant acceptance. And, she notes, it affects people of all ages, not just the elderly. Employing an engaging and even entertaining writing style, Bouton discusses the causes of hearing loss, the often horrendous—and ubiquitous—noise levels that surround us in the modern age, the ongoing stigma associated with hearing loss, the benefits and disadvantages of hearing aids and cochlear implants, the psychological impact of hearing loss, the lack of insurance coverage for hearing aids, and the debilitating toll that hearing loss can take in the workplace. In addition, she examines the condition’s “ugly stepsisters,” tinnitus and vertigo, before concluding on an encouraging note about ongoing research for a biological cure. Each chapter includes short profiles of people with hearing loss. An important and remarkable book. --June Sawyers

Edition details

• Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0374263043
• ISBN 13: 9780374263041
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288