Deafness In The Book Seeing Voices, By Oliver Sacks

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In the book Seeing Voices, the author describes the world of the deaf, which he explores with extreme passion. The book begins with the history of deaf people in the United States of America, the horrible ways in which they had been seen and treated, and their continuing struggle to gain hospitality in the hearing world. Seeing Voices also examines the visual language of the deaf, sign language, which is as expressive and as rich as any spoken language. This book covers a variety of topics in deaf studies, which includes sign language, the neurology of deafness, the treatment of Deaf American citizens in history, and the linguistic and social challenges that the deaf community face. In this book, Oliver Sacks does not view the deaf as people having a condition that can be treated, instead he sees the deaf more like a racial group. This book is divided into three parts. In the first part, Oliver Sacks states a strong case for sign language, saying it is in fact a complete language and that it is as comprehensive as English, French, Chinese, and any other spoken language. He also describes the unhappy story of oralism (this is the education of deaf students through oral language by using lip reading, speech, and mimicking the mouth shapes and breathing patterns of speech)) in deaf children’s education. In addition, the first part is about the history of deaf people as well as information about deafness. It also includes the author’s own introduction to the world of the deaf. In part two the book is about the view of American Sign Language and the way people have naturally created grammar and the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language from basically nothing. He demonstrates that this languag... ... middle of paper ... ...ninteresting to me, probably because of all the footnotes. Another problem I had with this book was all of the big, scientific words Oliver used. It seemed like jargon to me. Perhaps I don’t have an abundance of scientific vocabulary. Another thing that annoyed me with this book was how hard it was to find. It was only in public libraries, no book stores, and all the copies in Contra Costa County were already checked out. Eventually we found a copy of the book at the Menlo Park public library. Thank goodness by aunt lives near there and was able to get it for me. I think this book would be a good choice for someone who wanted to understand sign language in a scientific view or for someone who is taking deaf studies in college. Overall, I give this book a seven out of ten, due to the large amount of confusing footnotes, which overall isn’t a terrible score.

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