Seeing Voices:

...that they are a gift-the most wonderful of gifts-from one generation to another...

...As he says, "the study of the deaf shows us that much of what is distinctively human in us-our capacities for thought, for communication, and culture-do not develop automatically in us, are not just biological functions, but are, equally, social and historical in origin...

...Oliver Sacks Seeing Voices example of participant journalism...

...Even Noam Chomsky, whose idea of "generative grammar" is summarized by Sacks, referred to Sign as merely "the gesture language of the deaf," though at a 1965 conference he changed his definition of language from "a specific sound-meaning correspondence" to a "signal-meaning correspondence," Sacks's account of the student movement at Gallaudet in 1988, the third and final section of his book, is a powerful The hundreds of sign languages that have arisen spontaneously all over the world are as distinct and strongly differentiated as the world's range of spoken languages...

...Seeing Voices dramatizes how liberating the use of this language (A.S.L., American Sign Language) is for the deaf, quite different from their experience in learning speech or even signed English, which corresponds to English word by word...

...Sacks's skill in organizing the more specifically neurological aspects of his subject in a way that even lay readers can follow...

...Sacks confesses he used to do by looking at his deaf patients purely in medical terms as "diseased ears"-but is even more valuable in restoring a sense of wonder regarding the miracle of language...

...There is no one universal sign language...

...Seeing Voices succeeds by conveying its author's excitement not only with the intellectual discoveries he made in his research, but even more with the human aspects of the recent and ongoing breakthrough in consciousness among the deaf...

...The book's celebratory climax is the moving 1988 scene of protest in front of the Capitol with more than a thousand students from Gallaudet University-the internationally known college for the deaf- "signing freely" before the public in their demand for a deaf president for their school...

...Sacks emphasizes the role of William Stokoe in drawing scientific attention to Sign as a proper language...

...He also provides six pages of references plus an annotated bibliography that would be invaluable for anyone wanting to read more on key aspects of his subject...

...it is startling to realize that the latter's pioneering Sign Language Structure was not published until 1960 and was first treated with disdain by the majority of the Gallaudet faculty...

...This makes for a certain amount of repetition in Seeing Voices, and confusion is compounded by the distracting manner in which lengthy notes often run across successive pages...

...His "journey into the world of the deaf grew out of the task of reviewing a book about their history-When the Mind Hears, by Harlan Lane-in which he learned that Sign was different in mode from speech, and that the promising movement in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century education of the deaf primarily through Sign was crushed after 1870 by conformist pressure that they be forced to learn the "unnatural" (for them) language of speech...

...Oliver Sacks is a deeply humanistic neurologist who has managed to draw on his field of specializa- tion in a series of books, most notably The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, that impress his peers and also appeal to a nonspecialist audience...

...Sacks only began to learn Sign after completing his book, but he is convincing and eloquent in describing it as a genuine language, with its own grammar and a "unique linguistic use of space...

...readers will learn to look at deaf people communicating in sign language with new respect and delight...

...Seeing Voices is important in helping readers avoid dehumanizing the deaf-as Dr...

...And yet there may be universals in signed languages, which help to make it possible for their users to understand one another far more quickly than users of unrelated spoken languages could understand one another...

...In Seeing Voices he brings his scientific and literary skills to bear on deafness...

...most could and should have been incorporated in the main text...

...What at first seems to most of us like childish gesturing "is extraordinarily complex and consists of innumerable spatial patterns nested, three-dimensionally in each other...

...On the other hand, the middle section of the book shows Dr...

...Readers are powerfully aided in overcoming any condescension they may unconsciously harbor for the deaf and their language...

...indeed, they may never look at language itself in quite the same taken-for-granted way again...

...Sacks is an especially credible guide because he started with the same naive paternalism toward the deaf that most of us have absorbed in our culture: we feel vaguely sorry for them and assume that they should become as much like us as possible...

...like his earlier review-article on When the Mind Hears, it first appeared in somewhat altered form in the New York Review of Books...