Seeing Voices

Like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, it is a fascinating voyage into a unusual and wonderful land, a provocative meditation on communication, biology, adaptation, and culture.  In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks turns his attention to the topic of deafness, and the result’s a deeply felt portrait of a minority struggling for recognition and respect–a minority with its own wealthy, on occasion astonishing, culture and unique visual language, an bizarre mode of communication that tells us much concerning the basis of language in hearing people as well. Seeing Voices is, as Studs Terkel has written, “a stupendous, in addition to revelatory, work.”