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Revolutions of the Deaf
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16636 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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10 / 1989 |
2,422 Words |
| Author
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I. King Jordan
I. King Jordan is the president of Gallaudet University in
Washington, D.C. |
SEEING VOICES
A Journey into the World Of the Deaf
Oliver Sacks
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989
171 pp., $15.95
By coincidence, Oliver Sacks' book about the revolution, or better the revolutions, of the deaf has appeared in the same year that the French are celebrating the bicentennial of their revolution. I mention this coincidence for two reasons. First, the student revolt at Gallaudet in March 1988 assumes for many in the American deaf community much of the epochal character that the American and French revolutions have assumed for a large part of the Western World. Second, the roots of the Gallaudet protest are to be found in the French Enlightenment.
In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks brilliantly evokes the historical roots of what I alluded to above as the "revolutions of the deaf." Sacks identifies three such revolutions, and these are dealt with sequentially in the three long chapters that make up the book. Sacks is well known as a neurologist and author of several immensely popular, but uncompromisingly scholarly, books such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, which concerns the effects of neurological disorder. He is also a regular writer for the New York Review of Books; in fact, two of the three chapters are adapted from material originally appearing in that publication. Sacks' interest in deafness and the deaf community began when he was asked to review Harlan Lane's monumental history of the American deaf community, When the Mind Hears, and it is his review of this book that forms the first chapter
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