Special Collections

Sociolinguistics and Deaf Communities

How do people use sign languages in different situations around the world? How are sign languages distributed globally? What happens when they come in contact with spoken and written languages? These and other questions are explored in this new introduction to the sociolinguistics of sign languages and deaf communities. An international team brings insights and data from a wide range of sign languages, from the USA, Canada, England, Spain, Brazil and Australia. Topics covered include multilingualism in the global deaf community, sociolinguistic variation and change in sign languages, bilingualism and language contact between signed and spoken languages, attitudes towards sign languages, sign language planning and policy, and sign language discourse. Sociolinguistics and Deaf Communities will be welcomed by students of sign language and interpreting, teachers of sign language, and students and academics working in linguistics.

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

Shaman

Robert Jeremy Cole, the legendary doctor and hero of "The Physician," left an enduring legacy. From the 11th century on, the eldest son in each generation of the Cole family has borne the same first name and middle initial and many of these men have followed the medical profession. A few have been blessed with their ancestor's diagnostic skill and the "sixth sense" they call The Gift, the ability to know instinctively when death is impending. The tragedy of Rob J.'s life is the deafness of his son, Robert Jefferson Cole, who is called Shaman by everyone who knows him. Shaman's life is difficult. First, he must learn to speak so that he can take his place in the hearing world, and then he must fight against the prejudices of a society where physical differences matter. As Shaman struggles to achieve his identity, the Coles, along with the rest of America, are drawn into the conflict between the North and the South.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Inside Deaf Culture

In this [account] of the changing life of a community, the authors of Deaf in America reveal historical events and forces that have shaped the ways that Deaf people define themselves today. Inside Deaf Culture relates Deaf people's search for a voice of their own, and their proud self-discovery and self description as a flourishing culture.

Padden and Humphries show how the nineteenth-century schools for the deaf, with their denigration of sign language and their insistence on oralist teaching, shaped the lives of Deaf people for generations to come. They describe how Deaf culture and art thrived in mid-twentieth-century Deaf clubs and Deaf theater, and they profile controversial contemporary technologies.

Most triumphant is the story of the survival of the rich and complex American Sign Language long misunderstood but finally recognized by a hearing world that could not conceive of language in a form other than speech. In a moving conclusion, the authors describe their own very different pathways into the Deaf culture, and reveal the confidence and the anxiety of the people of this tenuous community as it faces the future.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Feathers

View our feature on Jacqueline Woodson's Feathers."Hope is the thing with feathers" starts the poem Frannie is reading in school. Frannie hasn't thought much about hope. There are so many other things to think about. Each day, her friend Samantha seems a bit more "holy." There is a new boy in class everyone is calling the Jesus Boy. And although the new boy looks like a white kid, he says he's not white. Who is he? During a winter full of surprises, good and bad, Frannie starts seeing a lot of things in a new light--her brother Sean's deafness, her mother's fear, the class bully's anger, her best friend's faith and her own desire for "the thing with feathers." Jacqueline Woodson once again takes readers on a journey into a young girl's heart and reveals the pain and the joy of learning to look beneath the surface.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

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

Changes for Julie

[Back Cover] Julie is in fifth grade-and in trouble! She was only helping her friend Joy, who is deaf, but her teacher doesn't care. After serving time in detention, Julie sets out to change the system. To do that, she'll have to win the election for student body president, running against the most popular boy in the school. As the election heats up, Julie tries to get the kids to listen to her ideas. When she realizes that the other kids don't like Joy, her choice for vice president, she considers dropping out of the race. But the last thing she wants is to hurt Joy's feelings-or lose her as a friend.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

A Quiet Undertaking

Macavity Award-winning author Penny Warner knows there's no rest for the dead....

Life is never dull in the California Gold Country town of Flat Skunk. But deaf journalist Connor Westphal is shocked all the same when she learns that boxes of human ashes have been found stashed in a nearby self-storage facility. The space is leased to one Jasper Coyne, a bourbon-happy fisherman hired by the Memory Kingdom Memorial Park to scatter the ashes at sea.

Connor thinks the scandal will make great copy for her paper, the Eureka!--until Jasper is murdered and suspicion falls on Connor's own best friend, Memory Kingdom owner Del Rey Montez. Connor is sure Del Rey is innocent. To prove it, Connor must navigate mortician politics and skinhead teens to untangle the secrets of Del Rey's past. But when she gets too close to the truth, she makes an enemy who's determined to make sure the intrepid reporter bites the dust along with her biggest scoop of the year.

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

Crocodile Meatloaf

As she becomes friends with Rachel, a deaf girl who has joined her sixth-grade class, Alex begins to feel that God has given her a mission to protect Rachel from the boy who is tormenting her.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

My Sister's Voice

Every love leaves an echo. . .

What do you do when you discover your whole life was a lie? In Mary Carter's unforgettable new novel, one woman is about to find out...

At twenty-eight, Lacey Gears is exactly where she wants to be. An up-and-coming, proudly Deaf artist in Philadelphia, she's in a relationship with a wonderful man and rarely thinks about her difficult childhood in a home for disabled orphans. That is, until Lacey receives a letter that begins, "You have a sister. A twin to be exact. . ." >P>Learning that her identical, hearing twin, Monica, experienced the normal childhood she was denied resurrects all of Lacey's grief, and she angrily sets out to find Monica and her biological parents. But the truth about Monica's life, their brief shared past, and the reason for the twins' separation is far from simple. And for every one of Lacey's questions that's answered, others are raised, more baffling and profound.Complex, moving, and beautifully told, My Sister's Voice is a novel about sisterhood, love of every shape, and the stories we cling to until real life comes crashing in. . .

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Typhon’s Children

To the new colonists, the teeming, ocean-dominated planet of Typhon seems a wondrous and exotic paradise--until the land erupts with incomprehensible violence, consuming the colony in a fiery hell. Their supplies lost, the survivors find themselves struggling against a world where death wears many guises. But the deadliest menace strikes from within--for every child born on Typhon suffers strange, degenerative mutations. Unless the situation can be reversed, the Typhon colony is doomed. Per Langstaff is a scientist obsessed with the life-and-death mystery, certain that the answer to the colony's survival lies with the virulent planet itself. His staunchest ally, Dilani, is a rebellious young girl born deaf to sound and convention, an orphan as unruly as the oceans themselves. Together these two outcasts, bound by a shared love of the depths, embark on an unforgettable journey that will take them to the utmost reaches of humanity . . . and beyond.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

A Maiden's Grave

Eight vulnerable girls and their helpless teachers are forced off a school bus and held hostage. The madman who has them at gunpoint has a simple plan: one hostage an hour will die unless the demands are met.

Called to the scene is Arthur Potter, the FBI's best hostage negotiator. He has a plan. But so does one of the hostages-a beautiful teacher who's willing to do anything to save the lives of her students. Now, the clock is ticking as a chilling game of cat and mouse begins.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Silent Dances

Deaf since birth, Tesa is the perfect ambassador to the alien Grus, whose sonic cries can shatter human ears. But her mission is harder than it looks. The Grus are not alone on their world. They have deadly enemies, both natural and otherwise. And if Tesa is to save all life on the planet, she will have to make peace with not one alien species but two.

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

Talk Talk

Over the past twenty-five years, T.C. Boyle has earned wide acclaim and an enthusiastic following with such adventurous, inimitable novels as The Tortilla Curtain, Drop City, and The Road to Wellville. For his riveting eleventh novel, Boyle offers readers the closest thing to a thriller he has ever written, a tightly scripted page turner about the trials of Dana Halter, a thirty-three-year-old deaf woman whose identity has been stolen. Featuring a woman in the lead role (a Boyle first), Talk Talk is both a suspenseful chase across America and a moving story about language, love, and identity from one of America's most versatile and entertaining novelists.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

No Excuses

The first deaf athlete to play offense in the NFL (and win a Super Bowl with the Seattle Seahawks!) relates his inspirational story of hard work and determination in his own words. Great for readers of all ages.The inspirational memoir from the popular current Seattle Seahawks running back Derrick Coleman Jr., who, in just his second year in the NFL, won the 2014 Super Bowl with the Seahawks. Showcasing his unlikely and challenging journey to become the first deaf offensive NFL player, he talks about overcoming internal obstacles and external obstacles (bullies and naysayers) in the course of reaching your true potential.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Eyes of Desire

In a collection of essays, deaf lesbians and gay men discuss their lives, describing how they discovered their sexual identity, overcame barriers to communication in a hearing world, and created a deaf gay and lesbian culture.

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

Anything But Silent

This book is a compilation of the most thought-provoking articles by deaf writer Mark Drolsbaugh. With a blend of humor and insight Drolsbaugh tackles some of the most profound topics in deafness deafhearing relationships the rift between American Sign Language and English the hidden world of the hard of hearing oppression in politics and education idiosyncrasies of the deaf and hearing and may others. Anything But Silent offers a deaf perspective that will bring knowing smiles to those familiar with the deaf community and enlightenment to those who are new to it.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Talking Hands

Imagine a village where everyone "speaks" sign language. Just such a village - an isolated Bedouin community in Israel with an unusually high rate of deafness - is at the heart of Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind. There, an indigenous sign language has sprung up, used by deaf and hearing villagers alike. It is a language no outsider has been able to decode, until now.

A New York Times reporter trained as a linguist, Margalit Fox is the only Western journalist to have set foot in this remarkable village. In Talking Hands, she follows an international team of scientists that is unraveling this mysterious language.

Because the sign language of the village has arisen completely on its own, outside the influence of any other language, it is a living demonstration of the "language instinct," man's inborn capacity to create language. If the researchers can decode this language, they will have helped isolate ingredients essential to all human language, signed and spoken. But as Talking Hands grippingly shows, their work in the village is also a race against time, because the unique language of the village may already be endangered.

Talking Hands offers a fascinating introduction to the signed languages of the world- languages as beautiful, vital and emphatically human as any other- explaining why they are now furnishing cognitive scientists with long-sought keys to understanding how language works...

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Deaf in Japan

Until the mid-1970s, deaf people in Japan had few legal rights and little social recognition. Legally, they were classified as minors or mentally deficient, unable to obtain driver's licenses or sign contracts and wills.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

The Mesa Conspiracy

David Kent unlocked the files of Department Thirty in his electrifying debut novel, "a thrill-a-minute ride" (Mystery Scene). Now he returns to the elusive government agency that erases criminal identities in exchange for lethal secrets -- in a heart-pounding new thriller. Raised by his tough but loving distant cousin Colleen, Eric Anthony never cared or asked what became of the parents who abandoned him early in life. But now Colleen is dying, and Eric, single dad to his young deaf son, is left with a mind-boggling mystery revealed in Colleen's last breaths: a cryptic directive from the man who was his father. Piecing together his shadowed past begins in the dust of Oklahoma's rugged terrain -- and leads to Department Thirty, where U.S. Marshal Faith Kelly chases the mastermind behind a wave of domestic terror. The nexus where their solo quests meet will have explosive implications for them both -- and will place many more than just themselves in grave danger.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, Inventor of the Telephone

A readable, interesting biography of the famous inventor, paying equal attention to his scientific achievements, his personal life, and his lifelong work with the deaf. There are several odd omissions, though, including why Bell adopted the middle name Graham; the spilled-acid aspect of the first telephone message and Bell's demonstration of the telephone before Queen Victoria.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

A Silent Terror

Revisit this tale of danger and intrigue from Lynette Eason

When Marianna Santino's roommate is killed, Detective Ethan O'Hara can't fathom the motive. Then he realizes the deaf teacher was the intended target. Marianna must have something the murderer desperately wants. But what? Digging for the truth, the guarded cop tries to learn everything he can about Marianna. Her world. Her family. Her beauty, faith and fierce independence. In spite of himself, Ethan finds that he can't keep his feelings at bay. Soon, he's willing to risk everything--including his heart--to lay the silent terror stalking Marianna to rest.

Date Added: 03/08/2018