Seeing Voices

I once saw a documentary about a couple whose daughter was deaf, and they were agonizing about whether to go ahead and have a complex and risky procedure performed which might restore some hearing for their child. I couldn't understand why the father's brother, who was himself profoundly deaf, was so upset that they were even considering this operation.

Having read Oliver Sacks' book, I now have a much greater understanding of how intensely proud deaf people are of their culture. The book describes much of the history of the deaf communities' language and struggle for identity. It reads like a history of a nation struggling for recognition of its rich culture and language. The book also gives many insights into deafness and its causes too, and describes sign language as a fully formed language (or languages!), as rich as any spoken form, but with a quality quite different. It becomes quite clear in the book that deaf people don't necessarily consider themselves 'ill' or 'disabled', but have a human condition which is simply different. This is perhaps why the uncle of the deaf girl in the documentary was upset by his brother's actions---it might be perceived as a kind of prejudice.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is simply interested other cultures, or perhaps just curious about a different human experience which can't be fully imagined if one is not deaf, but still some understanding and appreciation might be gained.

As ever, this Oliver Sacks book is easy to read, like his other popular accounts, and he is not just a passive observer but has many personal tales of his contacts with deaf people, their views and his relationships with them.

I love Oliver Sacks's writing because of his excitement, even his passion that he brings to his subjects. In every book of his that I have read, he has infected me with his sense of amazement at the puzzles of the human brain. Even after studying neurology I learned a lot about deafness and language from this book. However, I found the writing to be redundant and the editing to be poor. When he started to repeat the same ideas over and over again I started wondering whether this book had not originally been just a long article for the New York Review of Books. Moreover, many of the most interesting ideas were relegated to the footnotes and this made for very choppy reading. In short, I will always remain a big fan of Oliver Sacks, but I think his writing has improved a lot since he wrote this and I sure won't miss the footnotes if he leaves them out of his next book.

I loved this book and could have wished it twice as long. However, a friend to whom I recommended the book didn't think that highly of it. So to be honest, I guess this book isn't for everyone. It is true that particularly in this book, Sacks gets carried away by lots of long footnotes printed at the bottom of the pages. For me, reading them was like exploring every nook and cranny of a great cathedral. Absolutely enthralling. But for others, it may prove to be rather distracting. If you have ever pondered the endlessly fascinating relationship of language to thinking, you will like this book.