Like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, this is a fascinating voyage into a strange and wonderful land, a provocative meditation on communication, biology, adaptation, and culture.

In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks turns his attention to the subject of deafness, and the result is a deeply felt portrait of a minority struggling for recognition and respect–a minority with its own rich, sometimes astonishing, culture and unique visual language, an extraordinary mode of communication that tells us much about the basis of language in hearing people as well.

Seeing Voices presents both a history of the deaf and an account of the development of an extraordinary and expressive language. This title offers a way into a world that is, for many people, alien and unfamiliar – for to be profoundly deaf is not just to live in a world of silence, but also to live in a world where the visual is paramount.