Seeing Voices. A Journey into the World of the Deaf

Abstract

Oliver Sacks has been described (by New York Times Book Review) as 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, 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 the Chicago Sun-Times called wise, compassionate, and very literate...the kind that restore(s) one's faith 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 people, the (often outrageous) ways which they were seen and treated the past, and the new understanding that started to dawn the eighteenth century; and a journey into the present situation of the - a situation which, all too often, is still one of misunderstanding and mistreatment. Dr. Sacks writes of how he has to see people in a new light, as a people, with a distinctive language, sensibility, and culture of their own.Indeed, it is only the last ten years that the extraordinary and beautiful visual-gestural language of the - 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 the brain. The one overwhelming peril for the 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 manifestations of deaf consciousness the past twenty years, among them the remarkable uprising of the students at Gallaudet University 1988. The revolt gained international attention and showed the world decisively that 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 the course of this exhilarating journey raise issues of surprising depth and richness which, though of paramount interest to people and all concerned with them, also extend powerfully to the human condition general.