A review by readingtheend
The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness by Katie Booth

informative

3.0

Best known for inventing the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell dedicated much of his career not to his most famous invention but to his lifelong passion for deaf education. Raised by a deaf mother (and later married to a deaf wife), Bell believed ardently in his own ability to bring deaf children out of isolation and into community. But as Booth reveals in this careful and balanced history of Bell’s work, the community he desired for the deaf had nothing to do with the vibrant Deaf culture that was beginning to blossom in Bell’s time. Instead, he sought to teach deaf people to speak aloud, despite mounting evidence that this strategy damaged children’s language acquisition, precluded education in other subject areas, cut them off from the community of the signing deaf, and failed even at its stated goal of integrating them into the hearing world. Booth explores the progression of Bell’s career with compassion and nuance, eliding neither his good intentions nor the lasting harm that his emphasis on orality wrought on generations of D/deaf students.