Special Collections

Deaf-Blind Special Collection

Description: A collection featuring biographies, fiction and non-fiction by and about members of the deaf-blind community. For books by and about members of the deaf community, visit: https://www.bookshare.org/browse/collection/249852 #disability


Showing 1 through 25 of 75 results
 

A Picture Book of Helen Keller

by David A. Adler

A brief biography of the woman who overcame her handicaps of being both blind and deaf.

Date Added: 05/25/2017


Category: Young Reader

Not Fade Away

by Rebecca Alexander and Sascha Alper

Even a darkening world can be brilliantly lit from within.

Born with a rare genetic mutation called Usher Syndrome type III, Rebecca Alexander has been simultaneously losing both her sight and hearing since she was a child, and was told that she would likely be completely blind and deaf by age 30. Then, at 18, a fall from a window left her athletic body completely shattered.

None of us know what we would do in the face of such devastation. What Rebecca did was rise to every challenge she faced. She was losing her vision and hearing and her body was broken, but she refused to lose her drive, her zest for life and - maybe most importantly - her sense of humor. Now, at 35, with only a sliver of sight and significantly deteriorated hearing, she is a psychotherapist with two masters' degrees from Columbia University, and an athlete who teaches spin classes and regularly competes in extreme endurance races. She greets every day as if it were a gift, with boundless energy, innate curiosity, and a strength of spirit that have led her to places we can't imagine.

In Not Fade Away, Rebecca tells her extraordinary story, by turns harrowing, funny and inspiring. She meditates on what she's lost--from the sound of a whisper to seeing a sky full of stars, and what she's found in return--an exquisite sense of intimacy with those she is closest to, a love of silence, a profound gratitude for everything she still has, and a joy in simple pleasures that most of us forget to notice.

Not Fade Away is both a memoir of the senses and a unique look at the obstacles we all face--physical, psychological, and philosophical--exploring the extraordinary powers of memory, love, and perseverance. It is a gripping story, an offering of hope and motivation, and an exquisite reminder to live each day to its fullest.

Date Added: 05/25/2017


Category: Biography / Autobiography

Charmed Destinies

by Mercedes Lackey and Rachel Lee and Catherine Asaro

Three classic stories of timeless love and tantalizing fantasy. . .

Counting Crows by New York Times bestselling author Mercedes Lackey In Lady Gwynnhwyfar's dark, lonely court, her only ally was noble Sir Atremus, a warrior willing to fight for her honor. But would her powerful spell capture his heart-- or tumble the kingdom into chaos?

Drusilla's Dream by USA TODAY bestselling author Rachel Lee Every night Drusilla Morgan dreamed of courageous and handsome Miles Kennedy. Their quest: to battle evil and find true love. Yet when the sun rose, would Drusilla's fantasy man become a reality?

Moonglow by Nebula Award-winning author Catherine Asaro In a world where kings married for magic, Iris Larkspur was required to wed the prince--despite the spell that kept him deaf, mute and blind. Healing her bridegroom would take a power greater than any she'd ever known--one only two bonded hearts could provide!

Date Added: 05/25/2017


Category: Fiction

Deliverance from Jericho

by Bruce Atchison

Imagine being a disabled child, hastily sent to a boarding school hundreds of miles from home, and being kept there for months at a time. This was the fate of most physically and mentally impaired students half a century ago. Intellectuals and government officials once believed that the best way to educate “handicapped youngsters” was to segregate them from the able-bodied population, concentrating those pupils into large institutions.

Deliverance from Jericho: Six Years in a Blind School is the story of Bruce Atchison, one such child. Shuttled between a dysfunctional family and an uncaring asylum, his feelings and experiences are related here in a candid fashion. Through his partially-sighted eyes, readers are given a glimpse beyond the manicured lawns and impressive facades into the daily life of Jericho Hill School for the Deaf and Blind.

The author describes how he and his classmates learned Braille, used an abacus for arithmetic, and played sports, educational aspects which are not generally known to the public. Apart from those differences, school life was basically the same as in other institutes. Jericho had its bullies, its cliques, its out-of-touch administrators, and its deplorable food.

Date Added: 05/25/2017


Category: Biography / Autobiography

And The Journey Begins

by Cyril Axelrod

This life story of deafblind priest, Father Cyril Axelrod, makes compelling reading. A man of such spirituality, humanity, gentleness, compassion, humour, leadership and vision, he has worked tirelessly for others throughout his life and has become a worldwide ambassador for deaf and deafblind people.

He gives a remarkably poignant and tender account of his childhood as the profoundly Deaf child of an orthodox Jewish family in South Africa. He describes the wrenching spiritual journey that follows in his twenties and led him eventually to become a Catholic priest in order to serve deaf people. He tells too of his own painful transition from deafness to deafblindess as his sight deteriorates in middle age as a result of Usher syndrome.

Despite this, his remarkable pastoral work continues, using over eight different indigenous sign languages, in countries as varied as South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Australia, USA, China, Singapore, Macau, Ireland, and finally Britain. His work and his love for deaf and deafblind people transcends colour, creed and faith and has been recognised throughout the world.

This is the story of a remarkable man.

Date Added: 05/25/2017


Category: Biography / Autobiography

God Knows His Name

by Dave Bakke

Police found John Doe No. 24 in the early morning hours of October 11, 1945, in Jacksonville, Illinois. Unable to communicate, the deaf and mute teenager was labeled "feeble minded" and sentenced by a judge to the nightmarish jumble of the Lincoln State School and Colony in Lincoln. He remained in the Illinois mental health care system for over thirty years and died at the Sharon Oaks Nursing Home in Peoria on November 28, 1993.

The young black man, who later became blind, survived institutionalized hell: beatings, hunger, overcrowding, and the dehumanizing treatment that characterized state institutions through the 1950s. In spite of his environment, he made friends, took on responsibilities, and developed a sense of humor. People who knew him found him remarkable.

Award-winning journalist Dave Bakke reconstructs the life of John Doe No. 24 through research into a half-century of the state mental health system, personal interviews with people who knew him at various points during his life.

Date Added: 05/25/2017


Category: Biography / Autobiography

The Cloak of Dreams

by Béla Balázs

Intriguing fairy tales by the librettist of Béla Bartók’s opera Bluebeard’s CastleA man is changed into a flea and must bring his future parents together in order to become human again. A woman convinces a river god to cure her sick son, but the remedy has mixed consequences. A young man must choose whether to be close to his wife's soul or body. And two deaf mutes transcend their physical existence in the garden of dreams. Strange and fantastical, these fairy tales of Béla Balázs (1884-1949), Hungarian writer, film critic, and famous librettist of Bluebeard's Castle, reflect his profound interest in friendship, alienation, and Taoist philosophy. Translated and introduced by Jack Zipes, one of the world's leading authorities on fairy tales, The Cloak of Dreams brings together sixteen of Balázs's unique and haunting stories.Written in 1921, these fairy tales were originally published with twenty images drawn in the Chinese style by painter Mariette Lydis, and this new edition includes a selection of Lydis's brilliant illustrations. Together, the tales and pictures accentuate the motifs and themes that run throughout Balázs's work: wandering protagonists, mysterious woods and mountains, solitude, and magical transformation. His fairy tales express our deepest desires and the hope that, even in the midst of tragedy, we can transcend our difficulties and forge our own destinies.Unusual, wondrous fairy tales that examine the world's cruelties and twists of fate, The Cloak of Dreams will entertain, startle, and intrigue.

Date Added: 05/25/2017


Category: Young Reader

Beauty is a Verb

by Michael Northen and Sheila Black and Jennifer Bartlett

Chosen by the American Library Association as a 2012 Notable Book in Poetry.

Beauty is a Verb is a ground-breaking anthology of disability poetry, essays on disability, and writings on the poetics of both. Crip Poetry. Disability Poetry. Poems with Disabilities. This is where poetry and disability intersect, overlap, collide and make peace.

Sheila Black is a poet and children's book writer. In 2012, Poet Laureate Philip Levine chose her as a recipient of the Witter Bynner Fellowship.

Disability activist Jennifer Bartlett is a poet and critic with roots in the Language school.

Michael Northen is a poet and the editor of Wordgathering: A Journal of Poetics and Disability.

Date Added: 05/25/2017


Category: Fiction

Deaf-Blind Interpreting Workbook

by Mary Bauer and Karen Chriest Stueland and Jackie Engler-Morris and Janie Neal and Jelica Nuccio and Cynthia Wallace

This workbook was put together to cover basic Deaf-Blind interpreting techniques. Over the past years, the Seattle Deaf-Blind Community has shaped this class and the workbook has evolved.

Date Added: 05/25/2017


Category: Sign Language / Training

Crying Hands

by Horst Biesold and Williams Sayers

Exposes the active collusion with the Nazis of various physicians, administrators, and teachers of the deaf who embraced the Third Reich's eugenics policies. Documents the collusion of deaf leaders, who tried to incorporate all independent deaf groups into one Nazi organization while expelling deaf Jews, and traces resistance against the Third Reich by deaf Germans. Includes personal accounts of some of the 1,215 deaf victims of enforced sterilization, demonstrating the lasting physical and emotional pain of Nazi violations. The author is a retired professor and teacher of deaf students.

Date Added: 05/25/2017


Category: Culture

Walking Free

by Rosezelle Boggs-Qualls and Darryl C. Greene

Biography of a deaf-blind woman who spent 18 years isolated in a mental hospital before gaining her freedom, earning a college degree and working as a social worker in northeast Ohio. The co-authors are a deaf social worker and blind pastor.

Date Added: 05/25/2017


Category: Biography / Autobiography

Signs of Resistance

by Susan Burch and Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky

During the early nineteenth century, American schools for deaf education regarded sign language as the "natural language" of deaf people, using it as the principal mode of instruction and communication. These schools inadvertently became the seedbeds of an emerging Deaf community and culture. But by mid-century, an oralist movement developed that sought to suppress sign language, removing Deaf teachers and requiring deaf people to learn speech and lip reading. Historians have all assumed that in the early decades of the twentieth century oralism triumphed overwhelmingly.

Susan Burch shows us that everyone has it wrong; Deaf students, teachers, and staff consistently and creatively subverted oralist policies and goals within the schools. Ultimately, the efforts to assimilate Deaf people resulted in fortifying their ties to a separate Deaf cultural community.

In Signs of Resistance, Susan Burch persuasively reinterprets early twentieth century Deaf history. Using community sources such as Deaf newspapers, memoirs, films, and oral (sign language) interviews, Burch shows how the Deaf community mobilized to defend sign language, increased its political activism, and clarified its cultural values. In the process, a collective Deaf consciousness, identity, and political organization were formed.

Date Added: 05/25/2017


Category: Culture

Unaccompanied Sonata & Other Stories

by Orson Scott Card

Short stories by this prolific and award winning science fiction author. The title story is about truly unique music and its guardians, deafness and blindness.

Date Added: 05/25/2017


Category: Fiction

Remarkable Conversations

by Barbara Miles and Marianne Riggio and Carol Crook and Karen Olson and Cristina Castro

This book is a practical guide for teachers, family members and others who play a critical, direct role in the lives of children who are deafblind. The beginning chapters lay the foundation for the development of instructional programs for children who are congenitally deafblind or who have become deafblind early in life. Later chapters look more specifically and sequentially at the nuts and bolts of providing meaningful experiences for these learners. The final chapters address some of the underlying issues that are fundamental to providing personalized educational services for infants, children and young adults who are deafblind.

Date Added: 05/25/2017


Category: Non-Fiction

Words in My Hands

by Diane Chambers

Bert Riedel, an 86-year-old deaf-blind pianist, cut off from the world since age 45, discovers a new life through hand-over-hand sign, taught to him by the author.

Date Added: 05/25/2017


Category: Biography / Autobiography

Suddenly Slow

by John Lee Clark

This collection of poems opens with a stumble: 'It was not there / until I tripped over it.' But this is fitting because John Lee Clark bounces back, as he always does, artfully and unexpectedly, to make an astonishing statement. Snowballs, his long white cane, pears, Braille, bedsheets, sign language, and even morning light come alive in this deaf-blind poet's hands like they have never before. Thanks to his sparkling language, his intellectual playfulness, and his capacity for wonder, together with his unique perceptions of life, his poems add a much-needed new wrinkle to the lexicon of imagination. What he reflects on, others cannot see in the same way again, and that includes the poet himself: We understand that he is like the rest of humankind in all the most important ways.

Date Added: 12/19/2018


Category: Poetry

Through the Rain and Rainbow

by Lyle M. Crist

Richard Kenny lost his sight at age seven. He spent his childhood adjusting to and overcoming blindness. He entered college but had to drop out in his second year when his hearing failed.

The next ten years contained motes of both great anguish and sweet victory as he adjusted to being totally deaf-blind. With perseverance, the support of family and friends, and the counsel of such leaders as Helen Keller and other workers for the deaf and blind, Kenny became the third deaf-blind person in history to earn a college degree. He married, became a father, traveled and wrote.

Date Added: 05/25/2017


Category: Biography / Autobiography

Helen Keller

by Margaret Davidson

The bestselling biography of Helen Keller and how, with the commitment and lifelong friendship of Anne Sullivan, she learned to talk, read, and eventually graduate from college with honors.

Date Added: 05/25/2017


Category: Young Reader

Helen Keller's Teacher

by Margaret Davidson

For twenty- year- old Annie Sullivan, life had been one hardship after another. All alone and half blind, she grew up in a poorhouse with only her pride and determination to sustain her. Even though the odds were against her, she would never allow her handicaps to defeat her. That is until she meets Helen Keller. The world is a dark and silent prison for little Helen. She cannot see or hear or speak. To Annie falls the incredible task of teaching Helen how to read, to write - to live a full life. Is Annie up to this incredible challenge? Can she dare to dream of accomplishing a miracle? This is the true story of Annie's and Helen's courage and determination to succeed.

Date Added: 05/25/2017


Category: Young Reader

Helen Keller (Rebel Lives)

by Helen Keller and John Davis

A different portrayal of Keller, who is usually remembered for her work aiding blind and deaf-blind people.

Deaf and blind herself from the age of 19 months, Keller did indeed devote her adult life to helping those similarly afflicted - she was also a crusading Socialist, championing the poor and oppressed from all walks of life and leading a fight against the less obvious evil of social blindness.

John Davis has collected her political writing and speeches, including her arguments for women's suffrage, her opposition to the world wars and support for Eugene V. Debs.

Date Added: 05/25/2017


Category: Biography / Autobiography

Our Stories

by Marianne Decher

Short vignettes of real life sign language interpreting experiences that left a mark on interpreters' souls. Some pieces are funny, some serious. A few are written by Deaf and Deaf-Blind consumers.

Date Added: 05/25/2017


Category: Sign Language / Training

Usher's Syndrome

by Earlene Duncan and Hugh T. Prickett and Dan Finkelstein and Mccay Vernon and Toni Hollingsworth

Describes what Usher's syndrome is, how it impacts a person's life, and ways to cope with this dual disability.

Date Added: 03/08/2018


Category: Non-Fiction

Walk In My Shoes

by ed. Charlotte J. Dewitt

Usher Syndrome is a rare genetic disease that causes deafblindness. This anthology includes 27 authors writing about their experiences.

Date Added: 03/08/2018


Category: Young Reader

Hearing-Ear Dogs (Working Dogs)

by Howard Schroeder and Phyllis Raybin Emert

Did you know a dog can be trained to "alert" deaf people to the sound of alarm clocks, doorbells, and other noises? Learn how these amazing canines are trained. For grades 2 - 4.

Date Added: 05/25/2017


Category: Young Reader

The Education Of Laura Bridgman

by Ernest Freeberg

In the mid-nineteenth century, Laura Bridgman, a young child from New Hampshire, became one of the most famous women in the world. Philosophers, theologians, and educators hailed her as a miracle, and a vast public followed the intimate details of her life with rapt attention. This girl, all but forgotten today, was the first deaf and blind person ever to learn language. Laura's dark and silent life was transformed when she became the star pupil of the educational crusader Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe. Against the backdrop of an antebellum Boston seething with debates about human nature, programs of moral and educational reform, and battles between conservative and liberal Christians, Freeberg tells this extraordinary tale of mentor and student, scientist and experiment. Under Howe's constant tutelage, Laura voraciously absorbed the world around her, learning to communicate through finger language, as well as to write with confidence. Her remarkable breakthroughs vindicated Howe's faith in the power of education to overcome the most terrible of disabilities. In Howe's hands, Laura's education became an experiment that he hoped would prove his own controversial ideas about the body, mind, and soul. Poignant and hopeful, The Education of Laura Bridgman is both a success story of how a sightless and soundless girl gained contact with an ever-widening world, and also a cautionary tale about the way moral crusades and scientific progress can compromise each other. Anticipating the life of Helen Keller a half-century later, Laura's is a pioneering story of the journey from isolation to accomplishment, as well as a window onto what it means to be human under the most trying conditions.

Date Added: 05/25/2017


Category: Biography / Autobiography


Showing 1 through 25 of 75 results