From The Cover:
Lou Ann Walker was the eldest of three hearing children born to deaf parents. This is her story and theirs.
When you can hear and your parents are deaf, you bear the immense responsibility of being their ears and
voices; of being a messenger between two worlds.
Because when you are deaf, people would rather talk to
your toddler than try to communicate with you.
Lou Ann Walker paints her parents' portrait with the utmost tenderness, but she tells too of the child's frustration
at their difference from other people, of the hurt
inflicted by a world that is ignorantly cruel, and of her
struggle to come to terms with her own feelings and realize
her right to a voice of her own.
But A Loss For Words is about much more than deafness.
It opens a whole perspective on family relationships, survival,
self-knowledge and love.
'I was fortunate to find myself engrossed in a work so infused with tenderness, warmth and humanity.'
JOSEPH HELLER
'My respect for the deaf, always high, is now still higher. My awe for the human mind is out of sight.
LEWIS THOMAS
