The Feel of Silence (Health, Society, and Policy)

Rating:
Summary: Accepting oneself as less than perfect
Review: I found this book to be extremely powerful. Bonnie wholely admits to being in denial about her deafness til she was 38. At first I found this disturbing as she KNEW she was deaf, but claimed to be in denial. Three months AFTER I read the book it finally hit me what she was saying!!! She was not in denial about her deafness, she was in denial about the fact that her deafness made her different from other people, AND she was in denial that it impacted on her life! This was a huge lesson to me, because I was (then) doing the EXACT same thing!! I blamed a madrid of other "things" that affected my life EXCEPT for my hearing loss! What a relief it was to be able to accept the truth and get on with my life, and go forward! I now accept and do know that it is just a part of me that I have to live with every day!!! I must constantly educate others about it, and I am always appreciative of those who make the extra efforts to accommodate me and keep me informed on what is going on around me.

This book was very liberating for me and helped me tremendously! Bonnie is one of the very few deaf authors that addresses the implications that hearing loss has on one's own life, and those people directly around you.

Rating:
Summary: the feel of silence (health,society,and policy
Review: I found this book to be upsetting and depressing. All of her life, it seems the author never accepted the fact that she was deaf and tried "passing" as hearing for her entire life! Although I am not deaf and do not pretend to know what it is like to be deaf, I felt that she made her life so much more of a struggle by shunning the Deaf Community. She refused to sign and tried to live as a hearing person. This book left me with a feeling of overwhelming sadness for all that this woman has missed in her life as a result of not accepting her deafness and at least trying to be a part of both the hearing and the deaf communities.

Rating:
Summary: Miscataloged but worth reading
Review: I ran into this book by accident looking for a book about law. (LOC cataloged it in the Dewey system as 340.092, near books like Legal Realism at Yale.) It's actually the autobiography of Bonnie Poitras Tucker, born (so far as anyone can tell) totally deaf but who eventually became a lawyer and a law school professor. Tucker's strength is in communicating the burden of being deaf even for a gifted lip reader. I must say that I never thought about how terrifying darkness must be for the deaf, how much it would hurt to be thought rude because one couldn't hear everyday sounds or conversation, or even how a moustache might completely frustrate a lip reader. Tucker's reluctance to tell others about her handicap undoubtedly made some periods of her life more difficult than they might have been otherwise, but it takes little imagination for the reader to sympathize with her desire to be "normal." Curiously, although Tucker, is an expert on the law of disabilities, her book does not address legal issues in any rigorous way. For her, it is a self-evident truth that a theater owner should provide a seat for her interpreter at no charge. Likewise, the brief attempt she makes at discussing her religious beliefs (basically none) is more simplistic than one would expect from a law school teacher. Nevertheless, the book is worth reading. As a teacher who has had a number of deaf students over the years, I will certainly think twice before regrowing my moustache.

Rating:
Summary: Gratitude, compassion and frustration
Review: I would have never heard of this book if not for a dear friend's recommendation - whose 15-year old daughter has been deaf since birth. And I am as profoundly grateful to my friend Anna Marie, as I am to Bonnie Tucker, the author - for a lesson in gratitude. compassion and frustration . . .

All of us, the hearing - will learn of gratitude for the "given" of the sense of hearing. We will add to our repertoire of our feelings a very special variation of compassion - for one like Bonnie - full of zest and energy in her approach to life - who definitely does not want pity.

We will learn of the aspects of frustration which our hearing world may not conceive of. Why not learn of this? Why not absorb some of the unique feelings which none of us ever thought of, in the situations none of us ever has found himself/herself?

You, the psychologists, might add to your lists of therapeutic data - this very intelligent woman's pointers and leads - how and when to help the deaf . . .

As the deaf are not really deaf - witness Beethoven and his most significant output as a composer in the late years of life, when, after becoming deaf, his hearing switched inward, into the inner world of sound - after all we all have an inner ear.

So does Bonnie Tucker and she has proven it with her astounding life and career as a mom and an attorney. Hurrah to the victor!