The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa
10 best books like The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa (Josh Swiller): Burn Down the Ground: A Memoir, Mango Elephants in the Sun: How Life in an African Village Let Me Be in My Skin, Patchwork, Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals about the Mind, Somebody's Heart Is Burning: A Woman Wanderer in Africa, Nine Hills to Nambonkaha: Two Years in the Heart of an African Village, Deaf Like Me, Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World, Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love, The Village of Waiting
Burn Down the Ground: A Memoir
| Author | Kambri Crews |
| ISBN | 0345516028 |
In this powerful, affecting, and unflinching memoir, a daughter looks back on her unconventional childhood with deaf parents in rural Texas while trying to reconcile her present life—in which her father is serving a twenty-year sentence in a maximum-security prison.
As a child, Kambri...
| Author | Susana Herrera |
| ISBN | 1570625727 |
When the Peace Corps sends Susana Herrera to teach English in Northern Cameroon, she yearns to embrace her adopted village and its people, to drink deep from the spirit of Mother Africa—and to forget a bitter childhood and painful past. To the villagers, however, she's a rich American tourist, a nasara...
| Author | Ellen Banda-Aaku |
| ISBN | 0143527533 |
Winner of the Penguin Prize for African Writing 2010 (fiction). Destined from birth to inhabit two very different worlds - that of her father, the wealthy Joseph Sakavungo, and that of her mother, his mistress - this emotive tale takes us to the heart of a young girl's attempts to come to terms with her...
Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals about the Mind
| Author | Margalit Fox |
| ISBN | 0743247124 |
Imagine a village where everyone "speaks" sign language. Just such a village -- an isolated Bedouin community in Israel with an unusually high rate of deafness -- is at the heart of "Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind." There, an indigenous sign language has sprung up, used by deaf...
| Author | Tanya Shaffer |
| ISBN | 1400032598 |
“It's my life, and if I want to run from it I can,” quips Tanya Shaffer. An incorrigible wanderer, Shaffer has a habit of fleeing domesticity for the joys and rigors of the open road. This time her destination is Ghana, and what results is a transformative year spent roaming the African continent....
| Author | Sarah Erdman |
| ISBN | 0312423128 |
The village of Nambonkaha in the Ivory Coast is a place where electricity hasn't yet arrived, where sorcerers still conjure magic, where the tok-tok sound of women pounding corn fills the morning air like a drumbeat. As Sarah Erdman enters the social fold of the village as a Peace Corps volunteer, she...
| Author | Thomas S. Spradley |
| ISBN | 0930323114 |
Deaf Like Me is the moving account of parents coming to terms with their baby girl's profound deafness. The love, hope, and anxieties of all hearing parents of deaf children are expressed here with power and simplicity. In the epilogue, Lynn Spradley as a teenager reflects upon being deaf, her education,...
Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World
| Author | Leah Hager Cohen |
| ISBN | 0679761659 |
This subtitle is slightly misleading; it's mostly the story of students at a school for the deaf in New York City. It manages to do an excellent job of discussing various conflicting factions and attitudes that swirl around education of the deaf without taking sides or demonizing any one group. Due to...
Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love
| Author | Myron Uhlberg |
| ISBN | 0553806882 |
With candor and humor, Uhlberg recounts a childhood spent largely as a bridge between his parents and the hearing world. Translating from sign language to spoken language and back again, he enables his father to communicate with local shopkeepers, awakens his parents when his baby brother cries,...
| Author | George Packer |
| ISBN | 0374527806 |
Now restored to print with a new Foreword by Philip Gourevitch and an Afterword by the author, this book is a frank, moving, and vivid account of contemporary life in West Africa. Stationed as a Peace Corps instructor in the village of Lavié (the name means "wait a little more") in tiny and underdeveloped...
My impression of Peace Corps memoirs, before reading this book, was not good. This seems to be recognized as one of the better ones, and as an engaging, perceptive memoir with a strong writing style, it certainly exceeded my expectations.
Tidwell spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in...
| Author | Hilary Liftin |
| ISBN | 0375703675 |
A funny and moving story told through the letters of two women nurturing a friendship as they are separated by distance, experience, and time.
Close friends and former college roommates, Hilary Liftin and Kate Montgomery promised to write when Kate's Peace Corps assignment took her to Africa. Over...
The Mask of Benevolence: Disabling the Deaf Community
| Author | Harlan Lane |
| ISBN | 1581210094 |
A look at the gulf that separates the deaf minority from the hearing world, this book sheds light on the mistreatment of the deaf community by a hearing establishment that resists understanding and awareness. Critically acclaimed as a breakthrough when it was first published in 1992, this new edition...
For Hearing People Only: Answers to the Most Commonly Asked Questions About the Deaf Community, Its Culture, and the "Deaf Reality"
| Author | Matthew S. Moore |
| ISBN | 0963401610 |
Have you ever asked these questions? "Don't all Deaf people read lips?" "Is it OK to say 'deaf-mute' and 'deaf-and-dumb'?" "Do all deaf people benefit from hearing aids?" "What bothers a deaf person most about hearing people?" Here, in a handy question-and-answer format, are answers to some of the...
A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America
| Author | John Vickrey Van Cleve |
| ISBN | 0930323491 |
Well... OK so the book started off on kind of odd/low note with the authors berating the Christian Greek Scriptures for belittling the deaf. The biggest problem the authors had was with Romans 10:17 where Paul is discussing how people will put faith in the Good News with out having "heard" it. They are...
What's That Pig Outdoors?: A Memoir of Deafness
Henry Kisor, a veteran journalist, twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, lost his hearing at age three. He recounts the story of his life as a deaf person in a hearing culture in this engaging memoir, which offers a fascinating perspective on both worlds. "A first-rate memoir, notable for its candor,...
| Author | Moritz Thomsen |
| ISBN | 0295969288 |
this was the one of MANY peace corps memoirs i suffered through (reading material choices were limited to our paltry communal bookshelves in the volunteer lounge of the swaziland peace corps office).
anyway, i used to write a monthly literature review box or our volunteer newsletter, and one month...
Padre!: A Place Whose Rules Rearrange Your Own
| Author | Raven Moore |
| ISBN | 0989726606 |
Described as 'that missing voice from Generation X' by Roger Muntu from Voice of America, Raven fashions you front row seats to the ride of a lifetime. She is a cultural, nonfictionist tyrannosaurus rex and her narration of the lives of Ivoiriens during her 2 years living in Cote d'Ivoire, West Africa...
Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture
| Author | Carol Padden |
| ISBN | 0674194241 |
Refusing to accept the limitations others have placed on the deaf, the authors--themselves deaf--argue for a deaf culture, one united by & expressed thru the American Sign Language.
A long, painful experience of hearing intolerance has generally kept Deaf culture fairly closed to outsiders,...
Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha's Vineyard
From the seventeenth century to the early years of the twentieth, the population of Martha's Vineyard manifested an extremely high rate of profound hereditary deafness. In stark contrast to the experience of most Deaf people in our own society, the Vineyarders who were born Deaf were so thoroughly...
A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family
| Author | Lou Ann Walker |
| ISBN | 0060914254 |
I am not a CODA, but I am a sign language interpreter, so I understood much of what Lou Ann Walker was trying to express in her beautiful memoir A Loss for Words. I interpret for school-age children with varying degrees of hearing loss and the stories about Ms. Walker's parents growing up deaf in hearing...
| Author | Marlee Matlin |
| ISBN | 0689866968 |
The Barnes & Noble Review
Oscar-winning actor Marlee Matlin teaches us about friendship, differences, and patience in this buoyant and fulfilling novel featuring Megan, a deaf girl, and her new best friend.
Young Cindy's family has just moved to Morton Street, and Megan is already...
