A cursory examination of Noel O’Connell’s book Belonging might lead a reader to think, “Oh, it’s another book about being culturally Deaf,” but this notion quickly fades as the reader pays closer attention to O’Connell’s rich and accessible storytelling. In this autoethnography, O’Connell’s experiences growing up in a Deaf residential school in Ireland support themes evident in previous memoirs, rhetoric, and studies about Deafhood and pulls them together in a single text that is both touching and critical. O’Connell simultaneously celebrates his identity juxtaposed by abuse and subjugation he experienced in a stringent church-based educational system for Deaf students in Ireland. He bares his vulnerable Self, permitting readers a glimpse of how he has incorporated trauma into his self-conception. Drawing largely on the germinal works of Erving Goffman1 and Michel Foucault,2 as well as his own scholarship,3 O’Connell posits that Deaf people are a population of subalterns who live a life constrained by systemic abuse, denial of Self, and covert resistance.O’Connell earned a PhD in Educational Sociology, only the second Deaf person in Ireland to hold this distinction,4 from Mary Immaculate College in Limerick, Ireland, in 2013. Belonging was a product of the Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme, which he was awarded in 2015. O’Connell, born in 1963, became Deaf at the age of four. He quickly embraced Irish Sign Language (ISL) as part of his cultural identity, but the tide of educational thought for Deaf people at the time was distinctly oral-centric. He was fitted with a hearing aid and forced to attempt to speak, listen, and speechread. This autoethnography focuses on his earliest memories until he was age eighteen.Becoming grapples with the multifaceted oppression of Deaf students in the last quarter of the twentieth century in Ireland, which persists today. O’Connell’s argument is that Deaf youth lived in a constant state of surveillance by religious, audist zealots. Compulsory able-bodiedness left Deaf children disconnected from their families and the majority of their educators. O’Connell assigns Deaf people what Goffman5 called a spoiled identity and describes how they led a life of deception in order to claim their identities as ISL users, and in doing so formed a sense of cultural cohesion, but not without a price. Unavoidable as well as intentional deviation from hearing norms resulted in paternalization and dehumanization enacted by the clergy and their families. Their subjugated statuses as incomplete humans combined with physical, sexual, and emotional abuse as well as low expectations of their capacity to learn and succeed, destined Deaf students to live lives that were wrought with trauma and unrealized potential.O’Connell’s narrative does not myopically focus on injustices inflicted upon the Deaf population or justifying their existence as a cultural group, but instead skillfully details his holistic creation of Self. He crafts essays that reflect the thought processes of a young person without attempting to write a linear narrative, which adds to the authenticity of his prose. While O’Connell’s personal analysis is descriptive, well crafted, and theoretically sound, it often draws on dated, overused scholarship without fully exploring the implications of these theoretical lenses that he considers. Further, it is largely devoid of Deaf Studies scholarship, which seems peculiar given the topic. As a scholarly text, Belonging is an excellent entry-level autoethnography, well suited for students and the general public, but may be somewhat prosaic for scholars in related disciplines.The book is organized in eight chapters, each beginning with a quotation that suggests to readers the theme of the chapter. The beginning of the text provides a setting. The introduction provides essential biographic information about the author, ISL, and a justification of autoethnography as a form of scholarship. In chapter 1, O’Connell tells the story of his earliest memories and entry into the school system. Like most chapters in the book, it is bifurcated with primarily first-person narrative followed by analysis. He discussed the craft of autoethnography while providing a cursory suggestion of the duality of Deaf people’s lives in a Deaf/hearing world. The second chapter takes on the tone of historian, where O’Connell provides an objective and detailed history of Deaf education in Ireland.The text then focuses on school life. In chapter 3, the narrative is a common one, discussing the indoctrination of Deaf students in residential schools for the Deaf. He juxtaposes how rules and routines of institutional life enabled the all-male Deaf student body to create a sense of community. A collective consciousness about how to navigate the system formed, which was passed from cohort to cohort, and in those moments a culture burgeoned. However, the boys were products of the system, and their roles as partials, those who could hear and/or speak some and those who chose sign language, started to conflict. Their developing identities became conflicted as well. Complicating this negotiation was the oppressive conditions in which they lived. The nuns beat them for signing or for not being able to have a bowel movement on command, which they surveilled in a dehumanizing regimen. The analysis begins to unpack the effects of trauma on development drawing on Judith Herman’s work6 but quickly shifts to the history of oralism, which seems a bit out of place after such a disturbing and effective narrative.Chapter 4 continues the theme of surveillance, and O’Connell describes how the faculty members controlled the students through abuse and narratives about sign language as animalistic. However, the striking aspects of this chapter were the interpersonal relationships among students. A complex social network formed beneath the gaze of adults. O’Connell draws on Foucault’s7 panopticon and the docility that these kinds of conditions created, though quickly abandons this analysis. In the following chapter, notions of surveillance continue with mandated documentation of boys’ masturbation, interaction with females, and confessions to priests about signing. Institutional life conditioned the boys to be innovative and deceptive, which served them well to pursue romantic interests and to deepen their connections with other Deaf people. The analysis of this chapter skitters about, touching on ideas of gender differences among Deaf people in Ireland, the sociology of secrets, and then perfunctorily admits that sexual abuse occurred at the school, which O’Connell does not mention again.In chapter 6, O’Connell provides snippets of memories of his summers at home as a stranger among hearing people. This chapter is particularly effective, as these truncated narratives highlight his limited access to communication and socioemotional interaction. As a child he grasped for connections, but continually received messages about how he did not quite fit in. He reflects on the abstract noise that his tether to the hearing world, his hearing aid, provided: “All I want is total nothingness. This is who I am” (133). He yearned for the camaraderie of his Deaf peers, but was haunted by the indelible marks of the abuse at school. He cites an important consequence of his social isolation, the emergence of his love of reading and the connections he made between the experiences of slaves in the United States and Deaf people as he read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In his two-page analysis, he draws on Lauren Berlant’s discussion of subalterns8 and Goffman’s notion of stigma.9 Back at school in chapter 7, O’Connell further describes the dynamics of behavior among students and faculty members. These narratives highlight that despite good intentions educators nonetheless inflicted great harm, which Harlan Lane10 discussed in his book The Mask of Benevolence. The analysis of this chapter takes another unexpected turn and focuses on the contemporary history of mainstreaming Deaf students in Ireland. Chapter 8 fast-forwards to a present-day O’Connell, reflecting on his experiences as a Deaf youth in Ireland. He discusses his doctoral thesis in narrative form through conversations with other Deaf people. This well-crafted chapter describes his motivation and underlying approach to writing this text, which suggests that it might have served as a more effective inaugural chapter.There are two significant gaps in this autoethnography. O’Connell dedicates a great deal of text to describing how Deaf students are systematically barred from achieving success in life. For example, he discusses his desires to be a pilot and how his family and school herded him toward menial labor, which undermined his desire to learn. The reader is transported to a time when O’Connell was an accomplished academic without any sense of reconciliation. Throughout this review, I have noted how I felt the analysis could dig deeper into the meaning of the evocative narrative O’Connell crafted, but there is a caveat to this assessment, which emerges at the end of the book. O’Connell suggests that he intended this autoethnography to be a tribute to his Deaf brethren and wished for the text to be accessible and to introduce scholarship about the phenomena he described. He discusses that the Deaf population has varying levels of English literacy skills and suggests that he wrote this text with that in mind. As a Deaf adult, I respect and value this objective, because we deserve to have books written about us, for us. However, understanding this objective early in the text would help to frame reading of it in significant ways. Furthermore, the inclusion of scholarship conducted by Deaf people would buttress this important philosophical aim.Overall, I found this book to be well rounded, theoretically sound, and quite enjoyable to read. I exited the book feeling connected to O’Connell and fellow Deaf people around the world. Better understanding common themes in the global experiences of Deaf students is a developing area of scholarship to which this book contributes. Further investigation of these experiences is warranted. In my opinion, that the book appeals to a wide audience (i.e., non-academics, scholars, and Deaf people, in general) is both an asset and liability. While it invites a new wave of readership, it may not be wholly clear how readers should make meaning from the text. O’Connell shines as a storyteller by showing rather than telling the reader the intricacies of his experiences growing up in Deaf residential schools, and this feature alone makes the book a valuable contribution to Deaf literature.