The deaf world is a complex one, divided by the allegiance of some to Deaf Culture, which emphasizes communication by sign-language, and by others to oralism, which emphasizes speech as the primary means of communication, and still others to a program called Total Communication, which stresses both signing and speaking. Today, more and more deaf people, especially children, are choosing oralism because it helps them fit into mainstream society better. This work presents interviews with fourteen extraordinary oral deaf role models from diverse backgrounds and professions. Wall Street banker Ralph Marra, paralegal Kristin Buehl, 1984 Olympic gold medalist Jeff Float, percussionist Evelyn Glennie, engineer George Oberlander, university mathematics professor Dr. David James, law professor Bonnie Poitras Tucker, executive Carolyn Ginsburg, foundation head Mildred Oberkotter, architect Tom Fields, accountant and institute executive director Ken Levinson, finance manager Michael Janger, school administrator Kathleen Suffridge Treni, and teacher Karen Kirby tell of their experiences and stories, discuss what helped and what hindered them, and offer advice to parents of deaf children. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

A revelatory revisionist biography of Alexander Graham Bell — renowned inventor of the telephone and powerful enemy of the deaf community. When Alexander Graham Bell first unveiled his telephone to the world, it was considered miraculous. But few people know that it was inspired by another supposed miracle: his work teaching the deaf to speak. The son of one deaf woman and husband to another, he was motivated by a desire to empower deaf people by integrating them into the hearing world, but he ended up becoming their most powerful enemy, waging a war against sign language and deaf culture that still rages today. The Invention of Miracles tells the dual stories of Bell’s remarkable, world-changing invention and his dangerous ethnocide of deaf culture and language. It also charts the rise of deaf activism and tells the triumphant tale of a community reclaiming a once-forbidden language. Katie Booth has researched this story for over a decade, poring over Bell’s papers, Library of Congress archives, and the records of deaf schools around America. Witnessing the damaging impact of Bell’s legacy on her deaf family set her on a path that upturned everything she thought she knew about language, power, deafness, and technology.

Written by authors who are themselves Deaf, this unique book illuminates the life and culture of Deaf people from the inside, through their everyday talk, their shared myths, their art and performances, and the lessons they teach one another. Carol Padden and Tom Humphries employ the capitalized "Deaf" to refer to deaf people who share a natural language—American Sign Language (ASL—and a complex culture, historically created and actively transmitted across generations. Signed languages have traditionally been considered to be simply sets of gestures rather than natural languages. This mistaken belief, fostered by hearing people’s cultural views, has had tragic consequences for the education of deaf children; generations of children have attended schools in which they were forbidden to use a signed language. For Deaf people, as Padden and Humphries make clear, their signed language is life-giving, and is at the center of a rich cultural heritage. The tension between Deaf people’s views of themselves and the way the hearing world views them finds its way into their stories, which include tales about their origins and the characteristics they consider necessary for their existence and survival. Deaf in America includes folktales, accounts of old home movies, jokes, reminiscences, and translations of signed poems and modern signed performances. The authors introduce new material that has never before been published and also offer translations that capture as closely as possible the richness of the original material in ASL. Deaf in America will be of great interest to those interested in culture and language as well as to Deaf people and those who work with deaf children and Deaf people.

Since this book was first published, four years ago, there has been a considerable upsurge of interest in the field of both normal and abnormal voice production. Tangible evidence of this lies in the publication of the Journal of Voice in the United States, and in the UK the formation of the British Voice Association. This organization has attracted an increasing membership from professionals involved in all aspects of voice care and use - actors and singers, laryngologists and speech therapists, teachers and phoneticians. The Association holds regular study days, holds an annual two-day symposium, and publishes a Newsletter which attracts entries from this broad spectrum of professionals. We have also seen an increase in the number of specialist voice clinics, and in the two final chapters in this book a contrast is presented between such a specialist setting and the more typical clinic that operates in the majority of general hospitals. This last chapter now contains a breakdown of voice referrals over an eight-year period, which must represent a unique published study in this country. There still remains, however, little research into the management of voice disorders. There is clearly a need for more efficacy studies into specific treatment methods, and the single case-study designs developed in the field of aphasia would seem to be appropriate here.

The authoritative statement on the deaf, their education, and their struggle against prejudice.

But these debates, as Ree shows in illuminating detail, were distorted by systematic misunderstandings of the nature of language and the five senses. Ree traces the botched attempts to make language visible, and he charts the tortuous progress and final recognition of sign systems as natural languages in their own right."--BOOK JACKET.

From the seventeenth century to the early years of the twentieth, the population of Martha’s Vineyard manifested an extremely high rate of profound hereditary deafness. In stark contrast to the experience of most deaf people in our own society, the Vineyarders who were born deaf were so thoroughly integrated into the daily life of the community that they were not seen—and did not see themselves—as handicapped or as a group apart. Deaf people were included in all aspects of life, such as town politics, jobs, church affairs, and social life. How was this possible? On the Vineyard, hearing and deaf islanders alike grew up speaking sign language. This unique sociolinguistic adaptation meant that the usual barriers to communication between the hearing and the deaf, which so isolate many deaf people today, did not exist.