The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to End Deafness by Katie Booth
Summary: When Alexander Graham Bell first unveiled his telephone to the world, it was considered miraculous. But few people know that it was inspired by another supposed miracle: his work teaching the deaf to speak. The son of one deaf woman and husband to another, he was motivated by a desire to empower deaf people by integrating them into the hearing world, but he ended up becoming their most powerful enemy, waging a war against Sign Language and Deaf culture that still rages today. The Invention of Miracles tells the dual stories of Bell’s remarkable, world-changing invention and his dangerous ethnocide of Deaf culture and language. It also charts the rise of Deaf activism and tells the triumphant tale of a community reclaiming a once-forbidden language. Inspired by her mixed hearing/Deaf family, Katie Booth has researched this story for over a decade, poring over Bell’s papers, Library of Congress archives, and the records of deaf schools around America. Witnessing the damaging impact of Bell’s legacy on her family set her on a path that upturned everything she thought she knew about language, power, deafness, and technology.
Unlike many hearing people, I already knew quite a bit about the deep harm wrought by Bell’s crusade for oralism before reading this book. I knew that he had a deaf wife and a deaf mother, and I always wondered how he could have done so much to work against the Deaf community. I expected to be horrified by Bell’s work with eugenics, his attempts to prevent deaf people from intermarrying, and his disregard of the lived experienced and knowledge of deaf people – and I was horrified. What I didn’t expect was to find some measure of understanding for how Bell could have gone so wrong, for how the best of intentions, combined with the massive renown and wealth resulting from his invention of the telephone, led to decades of trauma for the Deaf community. Booth’s study of Bell’s life gives the full story, from the perspective of the Deaf community – which is too often missing from narratives of Bell’s work. Within the rigorous historical study is seated a deeply personal narrative as well, as the author explores her own place as a hearing granddaughter of Deaf grandparents, and what lessons Bell’s dismissal of the Deaf perspective has for all hearing members of the community.
Booth explores Bell’s greatest sin – disregarding the Deaf community’s perspective and wisdom. So it is deeply ironic that the book never capitalizes “Deaf” when referring to Deaf culture or the Deaf community – which has long been the stated preference of the Deaf community. I know too much about the publishing process to suppose that this was the author’s choice; more likely it was a battle that the publisher’s stylesheet won. But it is a distracting and disrespectful detail in what is otherwise an important scholarly work as well as an intensely readable biography.
THE INVENTION OF MIRACLES is out now.
Stories by Hand with Kathy MacMillan 