Thrillers With Deaf Characters

I read A Maiden's Grave by Jeffrey Deaver, years ago, and I couldn't put it down. This is the book that turned me into a Jeffrey Deaver fan long before he became popular. Though it's one of his earliest novels I believe maybe it is his best. This is about a bus full of Deaf school girls who end up getting kidnapped and held hostage in a deserted warehouse along with their Deaf teacher. The Deaf characters are portrayed as brave and smart as they find ways to foil their captors. Meanwhile a detective works around the clock to find them. It's a cat and mouse game of wits until the very end.

Another great thriller is Talk Talk by T.C. Boyle. This is about a Deaf woman who has her identity stolen. Falsely accused of a crime and her bank account frozen, she and her hearing boyfriend embark on a dangerous cross-country search for the sleazeball using her ID. The Deaf woman, Dana Halter, is brilliant, headstrong and courageous.

I loved the way both of these authors dispel stereotypes of Deaf people with their positive characterizations of the Deaf as strong and intelligent.

Banned Book Week is Over

I meant to blog about banned books last week. Since I work in a library there's probably nothing I'm more passionate about than our right to read whatever we please. Book challenging/burning/banning just . . . really. . . rubs me the wrong way. The only countries I know of that legally allow book censorship are dictatorships run by religious zealots (such as Iran and Afghanistan when it was run by the Taliban) and Communist countries like Cuba and N. Korea and so on. These are not nice places to live.

I'm all for parents putting restrictions on their kids. I don't have a problem with that at all. I respect everyone's right to determine what they find offensive, what they think their children are too immature to read, or too young to understand, and what they do not want in their homes. But I draw the line when others decide what is too offensive for everyone else's home.

Saturday October sixth ended this year's Banned Book Week 2007, and I forgot to mention it because I was too busy this past week. I had blogged about banned books a little bit last August and intended to revisit again. I already listed the most banned books of 2006 and of the past decade. You can find those blogs here: Challenged and Banned Books and The Top Ten.

The American Library Association offers a wonderful resource for learning more about challenged and banned books. I thought it would be nice to list this link where you can download a .pdf file that explains in a little more depth why certain books have been challenged or banned. I know some of you have been interested in this as you've asked me directly. It's called the 2007 Resource Guide. I'm not sure how big it is, so download at your own risk. :-)

Also-- another nifty section in the ALA site is the question/answer page on challenged and banned books. Just go here--ALA Question/Answer page on Banned books and scroll down about 1/4 and you'll find some question links.

I would love to hear from you if you've read a banned book, what your favorite banned book was, and what you liked about it. I have read several on the top 100 list. My favorite has to be Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. I can't imagine why it would have been challenged or banned. I am a big Ken Follet fan and Pillars is unquestionably my favorite book of his. A departure from his usual WWII war or spy/thriller novels, this was about architects building a church during medieval times. I read it several years ago now, and just talking about it tempts me to pick it up again.

And yes. . .I DO know the Bible has been banned all over the world, but it hasn't been banned HERE. The Bible doesn't count as a "banned book" -not here. Sorry. It isn't on the ALA banned books list.

That Doggone Sound

In the book This Is Your Brain On Music, author Daniel J. Levitin brought up an intriguing philosophical line of thought. He said the flavor vanilla doesn't exist in a bowl of pudding until your tongue touches it.

Then he went on to elaborate about light. Darkness doesn't exist. It's simply the absence of light, which only exists when we perceive it with our eyes.

Finally he got around to sound. It only exists when we hear it. Dogs and whales hear things we don't hear. We hear things other animals don't hear. Sound waves can't be seen or touched. They're invisible. Sound simply wouldn't exist for us at all if we had no mechanism to perceive it.

You see where I'm going with this. Sound is defined only by what we hear. Definitions are agreed upon by most humans. Normal hearing is defined by what the majority of humans hear, not what dogs or whales hear. Humans are deaf to sounds dogs and whales hear. However, those sounds still exist for a dog or whale. If deafness were defined by dogs, humans would be considered deaf. Does this not mean all humans are "deaf" to some degree?

What is a disability? It's all relative.

Later, Levitin explained it is not only what we hear but how we process what we hear that impacts our hearing perception, as well. Not all of us process what we hear the same way. What I hear is different from what other humans hear, and how I process it is different depending on the experiences I associate with certain sounds, and my genetic make-up and a lot of other technical biological considerations. This is why different people prefer different kinds of music, different voices, different rhythms, and so on.

The book is a fascinating, but highly technical look at how the brain processes sound and gave me lots to think about.

Good Deaf Reads

Last week while digging through a pile of old books I came across a great mystery I'd read long ago called A Maiden's Grave by Jeffrey Deaver. It was about two kidnappers who held a school bus full of young girls and their teachers hostage in an abandoned meat factory. The twist; the captives turned out to be deaf. What the kidnappers didn't count on was the trouble they would encounter controlling their victims due to the deaf girls' ability to speak silently to each other in ASL when their captors weren't looking. Oh this was a GREAT read! Another fun book I enjoyed a couple years ago was, If You Could Hear What I See, written by deaf comedian Kathy Buckley about her childhood. Then I remembered an informative biography I read about Thomas Gallaudet way back when I was a kid called Gallaudet, Friend of the deaf. This was an old, old biography written for children published in 1964, but was really quite good, though I'm not even sure it's available anymore. Occasionally I pick up a great "deaf" read. Flipping through the pages of some of my favorite books gave me the idea it might be fun to compile a list of good reads about deaf/hard-of-hearing people, their culture and history.

So I've done just that. I have only read the top two on this list, but I plan to read the rest. If you know of a good book or biography involving a deaf character or a great "deaf" non-fiction read, send me the title and author, and I'll add it to my list. I plan to place this list on the right side of my blog too, and separate the books by genre.

1. A Maiden's Grave by Jeffrey Deaver
2. If You Could Hear What I See by Kathy Buckley
3. Silence is Golden: A Connor Westphal Mystery by Penny Warner
4. Deafening by Frances Itani
5. The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
6. Through Deaf Eyes: A Photographic History Of An American Community
7. Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness On Martha's Vineyard by Nora Ellen Groce
8. In Silence: Growing Up Hearing In A Deaf World by Ruth Sidransky
9. The Tailor's Daughter by Janice Graham
10. Hurt Go Happy by Ginny Rorby
11. MindField by John F Egbert
12. Talk Talk by T. Coraghessan Boyle
13. Deaf Women's Lives: Three Self- Portraits
14. She Doesn't Look Deaf by Corinne Cheatham
15. Deaf In Delhi by Madan Vasishta

If you know of a book, send the title to me, and I'll add it!