The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness (2021)
Booth, Katie (Author)
Simon & Schuster
Physical Details: 416
Language: English
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.
...MoreReview Jessica Trussell (2021) Review of "The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness". Science (pp. 136-136).
Similar Citations
Book
Blume, Stuart S.;
(2010)
The Artificial Ear: Cochlear Implants and the Culture of Deafness
(/isis/citation/CBB001031571/)
Book
Jaipreet Virdi;
(2020)
Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History
(/isis/citation/CBB945172024/)
Article
Mauldin, Laura;
(2014)
Precarious Plasticity: Neuropolitics, Cochlear Implants, and the Redefinition of Deafness
(/isis/citation/CBB001421190/)
Thesis
Greenwald, Brian H.;
(2006)
Alexander Graham Bell through the Lens of Eugenics, 1883--1922
(/isis/citation/CBB001561598/)
Book
Claire L. Jones;
(2017)
Rethinking Modern Prostheses in Anglo-American Commodity Cultures, 1820-1939
(/isis/citation/CBB758244747/)
Thesis
Holly Caldwell;
(2016)
Modernizing deafness: Education, public health, and social reform in Mexico City, 1860-1940
(/isis/citation/CBB983379481/)
Thesis
Mills, Mara C.;
(2008)
The Dead Room: Deafness and Communication Engineering
(/isis/citation/CBB001560646/)
Article
Aparna Nair;
(2020)
‘These Curly-Bearded, Olive-Skinned Warriors’: Medicine, Prosthetics, Rehabilitation and the Disabled Sepoy in the First World War, 1914–1920
(/isis/citation/CBB880218189/)
Article
Ellis, Jason;
(2013)
“Inequalities of Children in Original Endowment”: How Intelligence Testing Transformed Early Special Education in a North American City School System
(/isis/citation/CBB001202082/)
Article
Marion A. Schmidt;
(2017)
Planes of Phenomenological Experience: The Psychology of Deafness as an Early Example of American Gestalt Psychology, 1928–1940
(/isis/citation/CBB049318165/)
Essay Review
Finn, Bernard S.;
(2009)
Bell and Gray: Just a Coincidence?
(/isis/citation/CBB001566395/)
Book
Christopher Beauchamp;
(2015)
Invented by Law: Alexander Graham Bell and the Patent That Changed America
(/isis/citation/CBB348460296/)
Article
Beauchamp, Christopher;
(2010)
Who Invented the Telephone? Lawyers, Patents, and the Judgments of History
(/isis/citation/CBB001230632/)
Article
Sánchez Miñana, Jesús;
Sánchez Ruiz, Carlos;
(2011)
Sobre la difusión del teléfono de Bell en sus comienzos (1876--1877)
(/isis/citation/CBB001212079/)
Book
Evenson, A. Edward;
(2000)
The Telephone Patent Conspiracy of 1876: The Elisha Gray-Alexander Bell Controversy and Its Many Players
(/isis/citation/CBB000950971/)
Book
Shulman, Seth;
(2008)
The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret
(/isis/citation/CBB000950970/)
Article
Frank Mondelli;
(2024)
Visible Vowels and Listening Limbs: Assistive Erasure in Japanese Publics
(/isis/citation/CBB476124072/)
Book
Bess Williamson;
Guffey, Elizabeth E.;
(2020)
Making disability modern : Design histories
(/isis/citation/CBB402138239/)
Book
Graeme Gooday;
Karen Sayer;
(2017)
Managing the Experience of Hearing Loss in Britain, 1830–1930
(/isis/citation/CBB651894216/)
Thesis
Hamraie, Aimi;
(2013)
What Can Universal Design Know? Bodies as Evidence in Disability-Accessible Design
(/isis/citation/CBB001562887/)
Be the first to comment!