The Invention of Miracles
Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
Finalist for the Mark Lynton History Prize
“Meticulously researched, crackling with insights, and rich in novelistic detail” (Steve Silberman), this “provocative, sensitive, beautifully written biography” (Sylvia Nasar) tells the true—and troubling—story of Alexander Graham Bell’s quest to end deafness.
“Researched and written through the Deaf perspective, this marvelously engaging history will have us rethinking the invention of the telephone.” —Jaipreet Virdi, PhD, author of Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History
We think of Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone, but that’s not how he saw his own career. As the son of a deaf woman and, later, husband to another, his goal in life from adolescence was to teach deaf students to speak. Even his tinkering sprang from his teaching work; the telephone had its origins as a speech reading machine.
The Invention of Miracles takes a “stirring” (The New York Times Book Review), “provocative” (The Boston Globe), “scrupulously researched” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) new look at an American icon, revealing the astonishing true genesis of the telephone and its connection to another, far more disturbing legacy of Bell’s: his efforts to suppress American Sign Language. Weaving together a dazzling tale of innovation with a moving love story, the book offers a heartbreaking account of how a champion can become an adversary and an enthralling depiction of the deaf community’s fight to reclaim a once-forbidden language.
Katie Booth has been researching this story for more than fifteen years, poring over Bell’s papers, Library of Congress archives, and the records of deaf schools around America. But she’s also lived with this story for her entire life. Witnessing the damaging impact of Bell’s legacy on her family would set her on a path that overturned everything she thought she knew about language, power, deafness, and the telephone.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Booth, a writing instructor at the University of Pittsburgh, debuts with an impassioned and scrupulously researched account of inventor Alexander Graham Bell's fraught legacy within the deaf community. The son of a deaf mother and the husband of a deaf wife, Bell was an ardent advocate for the social inclusion and education of deaf people. Booth explains how these good intentions, combined with his own pride as a speech educator, led Bell to work toward the universal adoption of a method of deaf education that prioritized the spoken word and lip-reading. When this oralist approach was adopted over manualism (sign language) or a combined practice, Booth argues, deaf people who failed to acquire speech had no functional language and thus no way to conceptualize and communicate their thoughts and feelings. Booth uses moving anecdotes about her deaf grandparents and great-aunt to illustrate the psychologically corrosive effects of oralism, and notes the irony that Bell, who saw the education of the deaf as his most important work, came to believe that the world would be better with fewer deaf people in it. Enriched with vivid sketches of Bell's wife, Mabel Hubbard, and other historical figures, including Helen Keller, this revelatory history deserves a wide readership.
