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  • Essay / Deafness in the book Seeing Voices, by Oliver Sacks

    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 were viewed 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 rich as any spoken language. This book covers a variety of topics related to deaf studies, including sign language, the neurology of deafness, the treatment of deaf American citizens in history, and the linguistic and social challenges facing the deaf community. In this book, Oliver Sacks does not view deaf people as people with a treatable illness, but rather as a racial group. This book is divided into three parts. In part one, Oliver Sacks makes a strong case for sign language, arguing that it is in fact a complete language and is as complete as English, French, Chinese and any other spoken language. It also describes the unfortunate history of oralism (i.e. the education of deaf students through oral language using lip reading, speaking and imitation of mouth shapes and breathing patterns of speech)) in the education of deaf children. Additionally, 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 deaf world. In the second part, the book discusses the vision of American Sign Language and how people naturally created the grammar and arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in American Sign Language . language from practically nothing. He demonstrates that this language...... middle of paper...... interests me, probably because of all the footnotes. Another problem I had with this book was all the big science words Oliver used. It seemed like jargon to me. Maybe I don't have much scientific vocabulary. Another thing that annoyed me about this book was how hard it was to find. It was only in public libraries, not bookstores, and all the copies in Contra Costa County had already been checked out. Eventually, we found a copy of the book at the Menlo Park Public Library. Thank goodness my aunt lives close by and was able to get it for me. I think this book would be a good choice for someone who wants to understand sign language from a scientific perspective or for someone who is taking deaf studies at university. Overall, I give this book a seven out of ten, due to the large number of confusing footnotes, which overall is not a terrible rating..