Special Collections

The Story of Beautiful Girl

It is 1968. Lynnie, a young white woman with a developmental disability, and Homan, an African American deaf man, are locked away in an institution, the School for the Incurable and Feebleminded, and have been left to languish, forgotten. Deeply in love, they escape, and find refuge in the farmhouse of Martha, a retired schoolteacher and widow. But the couple is not alone-Lynnie has just given birth to a baby girl. When the authorities catch up to them that same night, Homan escapes into the darkness, and Lynnie is caught. But before she is forced back into the institution, she whispers two words to Martha: "Hide her." And so begins the 40-year epic journey of Lynnie, Homan, Martha, and baby Julia-lives divided by seemingly insurmountable obstacles, yet drawn together by a secret pact and extraordinary love.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

The Gift of the Girl Who Couldn't Hear

Life can seem awfully confusing for a young girl turning 13. Suddenly the things young Eliza wants most, like a role in the school musical, seem hopelessly out of reach. Then Eliza starts teaching her friend Lucy--who has been deaf since birth--to sing, and her confusion begins to dissolve.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Song Without Words

Much has been written about the profoundly deaf, but the lives of the nearly 30 million partially deaf people in the United States today remain hidden. Song without Words tells the astonishing story of a man who, at the age of thirty-four, discovered that he had been deaf since childhood, yet somehow managed to navigate his way through Andover, Yale, and Columbia Law School, and to establish a prestigious international legal career.

Gerald Shea's witty and candid memoir of how he compensated for his deafness--through sheer determination and an amazing ability to translate the melody of vowels. His experience gives fascinating new insight into the nature and significance of language, the meaning of deafness, the fierce controversy between advocates of signing and of oral education, and the longing for full communication that unites us all.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Belonging

Gustie Blaine had it all--she was a cheerleader and an honor-roll student, she even got along with her parents--until the summer of her fifteenth year. That summer she got meningitis. It started with a headache, but in the end the illness left her deaf. Belonging is the story of how Gustie's life changed after that illness.

Gustie spent the first months of her recovery with hearing that yo-yoed. One day she could hear just about everything people said; the next, she understood almost nothing. She tried hearing aids, but they only made the garbled sounds louder, not clearer.

By the following winter her hearing was completely gone. Her best friend and confidante, Sara, suddenly had no time for her. School became a nightmare. She couldn't understand most of what was said in her classes. It was nearly impossible to keep up.

Gustie lived in a hearing world, and she felt cut off from everything and everyone. Even her parents. The old ease between them was now strained; accepting her hearing loss was hard. Traditions that the family had taken for granted, like sitting around the Christmas tree and listening to carols, were now impossible.

Gradually though, Gustie began to find new friends, like Lenore, a classmate who wasn't afraid of Gustie's deafness. She met Mr. Tate, a special education teacher, who showed her she still had choices, even in finding a way to communicate. And most importantly, she met Jack. He thought of her deafness as "part of the whole package."

Date Added: 03/08/2018

A Man without Words

A Man without Words vividly conveys the challenge, the frustrations, and the exhilaration of opening the mind of a congenitally deaf person to the concept of language.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Some Kids Are Deaf

Simple text and photographs describe kids who are deaf, the ways they communicate, and some of their everyday activities. Note to Parents and Teachers The Understanding Differences set supports national social studies standards related to individual development and identity. This book describes children who are deaf and illustrates their special needs. The photographs support early readers in understanding the text. The repetition of words and phrases helps early readers learn new words. This book also introduces early readers to subject-specific vocabulary words, which are defined in the Glossary. Early readers may need assistance to read some words and to use the Table of Content's, Glossary, Read More, Internet Sites, and Index sections of the book.

Date Added: 08/03/2021

Some Kids Are Deaf

Young children are curious about everything and everyone. This book acquaints them with some of the tools which deaf kids use. Other books in the Understanding Differences series are available in this library.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Carry Me Like Water

"Sentimental and ferocious, upsetting and tender, firmly magic-realist yet utterly modern. . . Sáenz is a writer with greatness in him." —San Diego Union TribuneWith Carry Me Like Water, Benjamin Alire Sáenz unfolds a beautiful story about hope and forgiveness, unexpected reunions, an expanded definition of family, and, ultimately, what happens when the disparate worlds of pain and privilege collide.Diego, a deaf-mute, is barely surviving on the border in El Paso, Texas. Diego's sister, Helen, who lives with her husband in the posh suburbs of San Francisco, long ago abandoned both her brother and her El Paso roots. Helen's best friend, Lizzie, a nurse in an AIDS ward, begins to uncover her own buried past after a mystical encounter with a patient.This immensely moving novel confronts divisions of race, gender, and class, fusing together the stories of people who come to recognize one another from former lives they didn't know existed— or that they tried to forget. 

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Seeing Voices

Sign language is, in the hands of its masters, a most beautiful and expressive language.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Your Child's Hearing Loss

From a mother whose daughter has hearing loss, and an audiologist with more than twenty-five years of experience with deaf and hard-of-hearing children and their families, this comprehensive volume offers parents what they need to know from day-to-day practical solutions to technical information to emotional support.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Hurt Go Happy

Thirteen-year-old Joey Willis is used to being left out of conversations. Though she's been deaf since the age of six, Joey's mother has never allowed her to learn sign language. She strains to read the lips of those around her, but often fails. Everything changes when Joey meets Dr. Charles Mansell and his baby chimpanzee, Sukari. Her new friends use sign language to communicate, and Joey secretly begins to learn to sign. Spending time with Charlie and Sukari, Joey has never been happier. She even starts making friends at school for the first time. But as Joey's world blooms with possibilities, Charlie's and Sukari's choices begin to narrow; until Sukari's very survival is in doubt.

Winner of the Schneider Family Book Award

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Apple Is My Sign

A 10-year-old boy returns to his parents' apple farm for the holidays after his first term at a school for the deaf in Philadelphia.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Secret Signs

In the mid-1800s, a boy and his mother help support themselves by making panoramic eggs of maple sugar. The boy, Luke, who is deaf, paints pictures that fit neatly inside the eggs. When a man bursts into their home and accuses them of hiding slaves, Luke's mother can honestly deny the charge. But she is that very day planning to meet their contact on the Underground Railroad to pass along information regarding the next "safe haven." Luke's mother is held at home, but the boy is courageous and resourceful in using his creative talents to help make the connection.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Singing Hands

As one of three hearing daughters of deaf parents, 12-year-old Gussie Davis is expected to be a proper representative of Saint Jude's Church for the Deaf in Birmingham, Alabama, which is run by her father. So when Gussie starts to hum through signed services in the summer of 1948, Reverend Davis assumes she merely wants to sing out loud and sends her to a regular church downtown. But Gussie's behavior worsens, and she is not allowed to go on a much-anticipated trip; instead, she must help her father at the Alabama School for the Deaf.

Rebelling against the strict rules of the school, Gussie finally confronts the difficulties and prejudices encountered by the deaf community, all while still trying to find her own identity in the worlds of both the hearing and the deaf.

Drawing on firsthand accounts of her mother's own childhood with deaf parents, Delia Ray provides an inside look at the South in the 1940s. Lively humor, unforgettable characters, and meticulous research combine to make this a standout novel that offers keen insight into what it means to be hearing in a deaf world.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

A Wall of Light

"I am Sonya Vronsky, professor of mathematics at Tel Aviv University, and this is the story of a day in late August. On this remarkable day I kissed a student, pursued a lover, found my father, and left my brother." So begins A Wall of Light, a novel which chronicles a single day in the life of Sonya, a thirty-two-year-old deaf woman about to break out of her predictable routine.

Sonya lives in Tel Aviv with her protective half-brother, Kostya; their household has dwindled from five to two. Anna, their mother, is now in a nursing home and Noah, Kostya's son, is living in Berlin. Kostya, wracked with guilt for the tragedies that have befallen Sonya, also grapples with the memory of his wife, Iris, a lawyer murdered in the course of a dangerous investigation seventeen years earlier.As we move through Sonya's day, Noah and Anna narrate their stories as well. Noah's journal entries cover the years 1980-1993, and Anna's letters to Andrei, her married lover in Russia, are written in 1957, after Anna has emigrated to Israel to build a new life for herself and her son, Kostya.

While Sonya's story moves rapidly through the events of a single day, Noah and Anna's voices take the reader back in time, filling in the circumstances that have led Sonya to this pivotal moment. We learn that Sonya has already endured two catastrophes. At age twelve, a medical mishap leaves her deaf, and at eighteen, while studying at university in Beersheba, Sonya is assaulted by two hoodlums. Throughout the novel, Sonya's experiences, instigated by both human error and human evil, are echoed by the larger, political violence that haunts modern Israel.

While Noah's and Anna's voices shed light on Sonya's journey, they also provide insights into the political and cultural fabric of Israel from the mid 1950s to the present. Noah's journal entries, starting with his tenth birthday and ending shortly after his army service, map his coming of age. We see him wrestling with his sexual identity and first sexual encounters, the fallout from his mother's leftist politics, and his own conscription to the army. Anna's secret letters to Andrei offer an outsider's perspective on the new Israeli state.

The remarkable events of Sonya's day are set in motion when her brother gives her an antihistamine. Overcome with sleepiness, she dismisses her morning class early, asking only one student, Matar, to stay behind. She wants to understand what lies behind his unusual expression. He answers that he has been involved in war crimes, and surprises Sonya by kissing her. Sonya feels that she has been roused from a long slumber and as the novel progresses we see the ways in which her awakened desire shapes her choices. She decides to take a taxi home from the university and impulsively invites the taxi driver inside and seduces him. He complies, but when she tells him she's deaf, he flees in confusion. Sonya is convinced that she has fallen in love with him, and decides to pursue him. She solicits her brother's help and sets out to find her lover.

Sonya's search gains in intensity and purpose as she travels to East Jerusalem. There she encounters the walls that prevent Palestinians from moving freely through the West Bank. After an Alice in Wonderland-like journey past numerous obstacles, Sonya finally makes it to her lover's house. This second encounter leads Sonya to a central revelation: the identity of her father.As this day of awakened desire and dispelled secrets closes, Sonya is able to step out from under the protective wing of her brother into a life that reflects both the ambiguity and uncertainty of contemporary Israel and her own personal possibilities.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Triumph of the Spirit

In 1988 the world's only deaf liberal arts university, Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. was ready for its next president. The Board of Trustees chose a hearing president who knew nothing about deafness. Unrest had been building on campus over this possibility, especially as there were highly qualified Deaf applicants. When the hearing person was selected and announced, the students exploded in protest. The next 7 days were covered by the national and international news media. What happened at Gallaudet had enormous worldwide impact. Since that protest, Deaf people have proudly advanced in all occupations. The DPN Movement has been likened to a civil rights movement for Deaf people. The author, Angel Ramos, PhD., was directly involved in the protest. Note: all spelling errors were in the print text.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Earth and Ashes

"You know, father, sorrow can turn to water and spill from your eyes, or it can sharpen your tongue into a sword, or it can become a time bomb that, one day, will explode and destroy you"

Earth and Ashes is the spare, powerful story of an Afghan man, Dastaguir, trying desperately to reach his son Murad, who has left his village to earn a living working at a mine. In the meantime the village has been bombed by the Russian army, and Dastaguir, with his newly-deaf grandson Yassin in tow, must reach Murad to tell him of the carnage. The old man is beset on all sides by sorrow, that of his grandson, who cannot understand, that of his son, who does not yet know, and his own, made even crueler by the message he must deliver.

Atiq Rahimi, whose reputation for writing war stories of immense drama and intimacy began with this, his first novel, has managed to condense centuries of Afghan history into a short tale of three very different generations. But he has also created a universal story about fathers and sons, and the terrible strain inflicted on those bonds of family during the unpredictable carnage of war.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Multilingual Aspects of Signed Language Communication and Disorder

Inquiry into signed languages has added to what is known about structural variation and language, language learning, and cognitive processing of language. However, comparatively little research has focused on communication disorders in signed language users. For some deaf children, atypicality is viewed as a phase that they will outgrow, and this results in late identification of linguistic or cognitive deficits that might have been addressed earlier. This volume takes a step towards describing different types of atypicality in language communicated in the signed modality such as linguistic impairment caused by deficits in visual processing, difficulties with motor movements, and neurological decline. Chapters within the book also consider communication differences in hearing children acquiring signed and spoken languages.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Resilience in Deaf Children

Historically, the diagnosis of deafness in a child has been closely associated with profound disability, including such typical outcomes as unmet potential and a life of isolation. A major shift away from this negative view has led to improved prospects for deaf children.

Resilience in Deaf Children emphasizes not only the capability of deaf individuals to withstand adversity, but also their positive adaptation through interactions with parents, peers, school, and community. In this engaging volume, leading researchers and professionals pay particular attention to such issues as attachment, self-concept, and social competence, which are crucial to the development of all young people. In addition, the volume offers strategies for family members, professionals, and others for promoting the well-being of deaf children and youth.

Coverage includes:
Attachment formation among deaf infants and their primary caregivers.
Deaf parents as sources of positive development and resilience for deaf infants.
Enhancing resilience to mental health disorders in deaf school children.
Strength-based guidelines for improving the developmental environments of deaf children and youth.
Community cultural wealth and deaf adolescents' resilience.
Self-efficacy in the management of anticipated work-family conflict as a resilience factor among young deaf adults.
Resilience in Deaf Children is essential reading for researchers, clinicians, and graduate students in clinical child, school, and developmental psychology as well as for allied researchers and professionals in such disciplines as school counseling, occupational therapy, and social work.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

I Have A Sister -- My Sister Is Deaf

A young deaf child who loves to run and jump and play is affectionately described by her older sister.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Her Only Hero

Penniless widow Laura McKay was determined to succeed on her own, but when an arsonist threatened her deaf daughter's safety, she was compelled to rely on firefighter Ryan Flanagan, the high school football hero who'd never noticed her as a shy underclassman.Physically fearless and an expert at avoiding romantic commitment, Ryan had nearly become his own worst enemy. But in the flames there's only one enemy: time, which just might be running out for Laura, unless Ryan's courage...and love...can withstand the test of fire.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Cultural and Language Diversity and the Deaf Experience

This edited volume provides a comprehensive analysis of deaf people as a culturally and linguistically distinct minority group within American society. Many educators, linguists, and researchers now favor this position, as opposed to that which states that a deaf person simply has an audiological disability. Contributors to this book include members of the deaf community, as well as prominent deaf and hearing educators and researchers. The text contains three sections, covering research on bilingualism and biculturalism, the impact of cultural and language diversity on the deaf experience, and first-hand accounts from deaf community members that highlight the emotional impact of living in the deaf and hearing worlds.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Child of Silence

1st in mystery series. Bo Bradley, child abuse investigator with manic-depression rescues deaf child. Light, fast read, but excellent depiction of what's now called bi-polar disorder.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

A Place for Grace

Grace is a little dog with big dreams. She longs to be a seeing-eye dog, but is disappointed when she finds that she is too small for guide dog school. Grace isn't discouraged for long, though. She's discovered by Charlie, a deaf man who sees her perform a remarkable rescue and who knows a way she can use her eagerness and courage to help other people.

Charlie takes Grace to a hearing dog program, where she learns the skills dogs need to assist the hearing impaired throughout the day. School is difficult for Grace, but thanks to the flexibility of Mrs. Lombardi, the program director, and Charlie's encouragement, Grace finally succeeds in her own inimitable way.

A Place for Grace introduces children to the challenges of the hearing impaired and gives them the opportunity to see how people communicate through American Sign Language. Charlie uses some creative problem-solving to help Grace complete the hearing dog program; her struggles, hard work, and ultimate triumph make Grace an inspiring model for children facing obstacles in school and family life.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Chelsea

Chelsea: The Story of a Signal Dog is the heartwarming, humorous, inspirational love story of a young deaf couple and the beautiful Belgian sheepdog who acts as their "ears" When Paul and Anne Ogden felt they needed a better link to the hearing world, they turned to Canine Companions for independence, a unique organization that trains dogs to help deaf and disabled persons live more successfully and creatively with their special needs. ...

Once the Ogdens return home with Chelsea, the story unfolds in lively detail. Life in a deaf family with an "almost human" dog seems to be a constant series of adventures and misadventures, and as Chelsea matures into a proud professional, readers will be utterly captivated by her charm. In addition to being a heartfelt animal story, the book shows us life in the deaf world ...

Poignant, touching, and joyful, Chelsea reveals deeper truths about the way we communicate or fail to communicate with one another, while conveying the spirit of triumph that once again proves that dogs are man's (and woman's) best friend. Chelsea is a love story guaranteed to delight.

Paul W. Ogden, professor of deaf education at California State University at Fresno, is the coauthor of The Silent Garden: Understanding the Hearing-Impaired Child. He lives with his wife, Anne Keegan Ogden, R.N., and their signal dog, Chelsea. When Paul is not teaching, writing, or beachcombing, he is collecting stories from deaf people for an anthology.

Date Added: 03/08/2018