If a Tree Falls: A Family's Quest to Hear and Be HeardA revealing memoir of a family and a “wrenching journey into deafness from the standpoint of a mother, a wife, a daughter, a philosopher, and a Jew” (Ilan Stavans, author of On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language). When her daughters were born deaf, Jennifer Rosner was stunned. Then she discovered a hidden history of deafness in her family, going back generations to the Jewish enclaves of Eastern Europe. Traveling back in time in her mind, she imagined her silent relatives, who showed surprising creativity in dealing with a world that preferred to ignore them. Here, in a “gentle meditation on sound and silence, love and family” Rosner shares her journey into the modern world of deafness, and the controversial decisions she and her husband made about hearing aids, cochlear implants and sign language (Publishers Weekly). Punctuated by memories of being unheard, Rosner’s imaginative odyssey of dealing with her daughters’ deafness is at its heart a story of whether she—a mother with perfect hearing—can ever truly hear her children. |
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LibraryThing Review
User Review - suesbooks - LibraryThingI read this book for a second time after many years and probably got no more out of it than the first time I read it. The family struggles when dealing with a family with many challenges (hearing ... Read full review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - suesbooks - LibraryThingThis book was fine to learn about the hearing impaired community, and how a family dealt with their hearing impaired daughters. Some fiction was interspersed, but it added very little to the book, as the writing was journalistic. Read full review
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