Special Collections

Deaf Child Crossing

Megan is excited when Cindy moves into her neighborhood -- maybe she'll finally have a best friend. Sure enough, the two girls quickly become inseparable. Cindy even starts to learn sign language so they can communicate more easily.

But when they go away to summer camp together, problems arise. Cindy feels left out, because Megan is spending all of her time with Lizzie, another deaf girl; Megan resents that Cindy is always trying to help her, even when she doesn't need help. Before they can mend their differences, both girls have to learn what it means to be a friend.

A sensitive depiction of childhood friendship with its fragility, jealousies, and joys" - Booklist

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Deaf Culture A to Z

"A is for American Sign Language. American Sign Language (ASL) is the language of signs used among many Deaf people. Each sign represents a word or words. In the picture on the right, the boy is signing, "What should I do?" The librarian answers, "You can read a book on Deaf Culture." ASL is a beautiful language and it is fun to learn."

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Deafening

This novel interweaves the lives of its two main characters - Grania, deaf since age five; and her husband Jim, who serves as a medic on the battlefields of World War I. The story begins with Grania's childhood in a small Canadian town, and her years at a residential school for the deaf. Her relationships within her family are portrayed with insight and depth. Jim leaves for Europe two weeks after his marriage to Grania, and much of the book involves his horrifying experience of the war. The author based Grania's character on her own grandmother, who was deaf, and has done extensive research on both deaf history and the social history of the World War I era. This is an absorbing novel and gives a refreshingly rounded depiction of a woman with a disability.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Deaf Heritage

This in-depth history of Deaf America begins with an overview of the early years. Each chapter then covers a decade of history, beginning with 1880. The text is supplemented by marvelous pictures, illustrations, vignettes and biographical profiles. "Subchapters" chronicle the multi-facited dimensions of Deaf culture by focusing on Deaf athletes and more. A complete Deaf Culture course!

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

Deaf Like Me

Deaf Like Me is the moving account of parents coming to terms with their baby girl's profound deafness. The love, hope, and anxieties of all hearing parents of deaf children are expressed here with power and simplicity.

In the epilogue, Lynn Spradley as a teenager reflects upon being deaf, her education, her struggle to communicate, and the discovery that she was the focus of her father's and uncle's book. At once moving and inspiring, Deaf Like Me is must reading for every parent, relative, and friend of deaf children everywhere.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

The Deaf Musicians

Lee is a piano man. Every night, he plays jazz for the crowd. It sounds something like this:

Plink-a-plink-BOMP-plink-plink.

Yimba-timba-TANG-ZANG-ZANG.

One night, Lee's bandmates notice something is off. Lee's music comes out like this:

Ronk. Phip. Tonk.

There's no way to hide it: Lee is losing his hearing. Then Lee discovers sign language. And soon after, he meets Max, who plays the sax. Together they form a new band-the Deaf Musicians. But who will listen to a deaf musician?

With The Deaf Musicians, Pete Seeger, Paul DuBois Jacobs, and three-time Coretta Scott King Honor winner R. Gregory Christie present an inspiring story of overcoming obstacles, set to a jazzy score.

OO-AH, BE-DOOP, BE-DOOP, OO-AH, YEAH!

Winner of the Schneider Family Book Award

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Dovey Coe

There have been Coes living in the mountains of Indian Creek, North Carolina, going on forever, and everyone in town is amazed that twelve-year-old Dovey might ur and do such a terrible thing. Even if the girl does have the tendency to shoot her mouth off, she's had good reason since she's always had to stick up for her brother, Amos, who may be older and bigger, but folks treat like he's slow on account of his being deaf. Her sister, Caroline, might shake her head over Dovey's high spirits, but if Caroline hadn't been letting the likes of Parnell Caraway hang around her all summer, Dovey wouldn't be in this mess. Dovey's not one to sit back when troubles are brewing, but now with this murder charge, for once she might just have to keep quiet and let the slick city lawyer take care of things, or will she?

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

Echo

In book two of the Sensations series, Cassie Dixon's getaway to the mountains with her friends and their thirteen-year-old deaf son becomes a high-stakes search when the boy disappears. Danger stalks the slopes.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Eloquent Silence

Lauri is a dedicated young teacher for the deaf. Her past conceals a wound still unhealed, her present is a facade, and she uses her career to hide her loneliness. Drake, daytime TV's most popular star, has two secrets -- the daughter he believes may never have a normal life and the dead wife he can't forget. Jennifer is the beautiful hearing-impaired child who may become a pawn between the man and the woman she needs most. Now, in a chic New Mexico arts community, the three are given a chance to be a family...but first each must find a voice to express the deepest fears and greatest needs of the heart.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Enforcing Normalcy

This book tries to think through some of the complex issues raised by concepts such as the body, the normal, the abnormal, disability, the disabled, and people with disabilities. I wrote this book because I believe deeply that people with disabilities, Deaf people, and others who might not even consider themselves as having a disability have been relegated to the margins by the very people who have celebrated and championed the emergence of multiculturalism, class consciousness, feminism, and queer studies from the margins.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language

From the seventeenth century to the early years of the twentieth, the population of Martha's Vineyard manifested an extremely high rate of profound hereditary deafness.

In stark contrast to the experience of most deaf people in our own society, the Vineyarders who were born deaf were so thoroughly integrated into the daily life of the community that they were not seen-- and did not see themselves-- as handicapped or as a group apart. Deaf people were included in all aspects of life, such as town politics, jobs, church affairs, and social life.

How was this possible? On the Vineyard, hearing and deaf islanders alike grew up speaking sign language. This unique sociolinguistic adaptation meant that the usual barriers to communication between the hearing and the deaf, which so isolate many deaf people today, did not exist.

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

Eyes of Desire 2

This book is an anthology of articles about Deaf gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) persons in the United States and elsewhere in the world.

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

Finding Zoe

At just a few months old, Zoe was gradually losing her hearing. Her adoptive parents loved her-yet agonized-feeling they couldn't handle raising a Deaf child. Would Zoe go back into the welfare system and spend her childhood hoping to find parents willing to adopt her? Or, would she be the long-sought answer to a mother's prayers?

Brandi Rarus was just 6 when spinal meningitis took away her hearing. Because she spoke well and easily adjusted to lip reading, she was mainstreamed in school and socialized primarily in the hearing community. Brandi was a popular, happy teen, but being fully part of every conversation was an ongoing struggle. She felt caught between two worlds-the Deaf and the hearing.

In college, Brandi embraced Deaf Culture along with the joys of complete and effortless communication with her peers. Brandi went on to become Miss Deaf America in 1988 and served as a spokesperson for her community. It was during her tenure as Miss Deaf America that Brandi met Tim, a leader of the Gallaudet Uprising in support of selecting the university's first Deaf president. The two went on to marry and had three hearing boys-the first non-deaf children born in Tim's family in 125 years.

Brandi was incredibly grateful to have her three wonderful sons, but couldn't shake the feeling something was missing. She didn't know that Zoe, a six-month-old Deaf baby girl caught in the foster care system, was desperately in need of a family unafraid of her different needs. Brandi found the answer to her prayers when fate brought her new adopted daughter into her life.

Set against the backdrop of Deaf America, Finding Zoe is an uplifting story of hope, adoption, and everyday miracles.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Five Flavors of Dumb

The Challenge: Piper has one month to get the rock band Dumb a paying gig.

The Deal: If she does it, Piper will become the band's manager and get her share of the profits.

The Catch: How can Piper possibly manage one egomaniacal pretty boy, one talentless piece of eye candy, one crush, one silent rocker, and one angry girl? And how can she do it when she's deaf?

Piper can't hear Dumb's music, but with growing self-confidence, a budding romance, and a new understanding of the decision her family made to buy a cochlear implant for her deaf baby sister, she discovers her own inner rock star and what it truly means to be a flavor of Dumb.

Winner of the Schneider Family Book Award

Date Added: 03/08/2018

For Hearing People Only

A question and answer book to those questions that the general public wants to know about Deafness, the Deaf culture, and what it is like to be Deaf in America.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Gallaudet

On a May day in 1814, while watching his younger brothers and sisters at play, Thomas noticed a small girl taking no part. She was Alice Cogswell, and deafness shut her out of the circle. The lack of language created a barrier between her and her friends. Thomas invented a game that helped Alice for the first time in her life to understand that things have names. Thomas knew what he could do. He knew he had to bring education for the deaf to America!

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

Girl in the Shadows

Some secrets survive the light of day, others should stay lost in darkness forever—the family saga that began with April Shadows continues!April Taylor wasn't a little girl anymore—but who was she really? The home she shared with her parents and her older sister, Brenda, may have been filled with turmoil, but it was the only home she knew. Now, with nowhere to go in the wake of losing her mother and father, April had to grow up fast as she embarked on an odyssey of heartbreak and betrayal. It was mere chance that led her to the secluded home of a kindly elderly woman and her deaf teenaged granddaughter, Echo. There, April found a shelter from her mixed-up life, and from the confusion that severed her relationship with Brenda, after an encounter with Brenda's girlfriend, Celia. But when a dangerous couple arrives with greedy intentions, April discovers they will take advantage of her very special friendship with Echo to get what they want. Now, April's survival depends on being true to the one person she's never fully accepted: herself.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Give Me a Sign

Jenny Han meets CODA in this big-hearted YA debut about first love and Deaf pride at a summer camp.

Lilah is stuck in the middle. At least, that’s what having a hearing loss seems like sometimes—when you don’t feel “deaf enough” to identify as Deaf or hearing enough to meet the world’s expectations. But this summer, Lilah is ready for a change.

When Lilah becomes a counselor at a summer camp for the deaf and blind, her plan is to brush up on her ASL. Once there, she also finds a community. There are cute British lifeguards who break hearts but not rules, a YouTuber who’s just a bit desperate for clout, the campers Lilah’s responsible for (and overwhelmed by)—and then there’s Isaac, the dreamy Deaf counselor who volunteers to help Lilah with her signing.

Romance was never on the agenda, and Lilah’s not positive Isaac likes her that way. But all signs seem to point to love. Unless she’s reading them wrong? One thing’s for sure: Lilah wanted change, and things here . . . they're certainly different than what she’s used to.

Date Added: 03/06/2024

Hands of My Father

By turns heart-tugging and hilarious, Myron Uhlberg's memoir tells the story of growing up as the hearing son of deaf parents--and his life in a world that he found unaccountably beautiful, even as he longed to escape it."Does sound have rhythm?" my father asked. "Does it rise and fall like the ocean? Does it come and go like the wind?" Such were the kinds of questions that Myron Uhlberg's deaf father asked him from earliest childhood, in his eternal quest to decipher, and to understand, the elusive nature of sound. Quite a challenge for a young boy, and one of many he would face. Uhlberg's first language was American Sign Language, the first sign he learned: "I love you."

But his second language was spoken English--and no sooner did he learn it than he was called upon to act as his father's ears and mouth in the stores and streets of the neighborhood beyond their silent apartment in Brooklyn. Resentful as he sometimes was of the heavy burdens heaped on his small shoulders, he nonetheless adored his parents, who passed on to him their own passionate engagement with life. These two remarkable people married and had children at the absolute bottom of the Great Depression--an expression of extraordinary optimism, and typical of the joy and resilience they were able to summon at even the darkest of times.

From the beaches of Coney Island to Ebbets Field, where he watches his father's hero Jackie Robinson play ball, from the branch library above the local Chinese restaurant where the odor of chow mein rose from the pages of the books he devoured to the hospital ward where he visits his polio-afflicted friend, this is a memoir filled with stories about growing up not just as the child of two deaf people but as a book-loving, mischief-making, tree-climbing kid during the remarkably eventful period that spanned the Depression, the War, and the early fifties.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Hark!

Ed McBain concocts a brilliant and intricate thriller about a master criminal who haunts the city with cryptic passages from Shakespeare, directing the detectives of the 87th Precinct to a future crime -- if only they can figure out what he means. The 87th Precinct gets a visit from one of the city's most accomplished criminals -- a thief known as the Deaf Man. Because he might be deaf. Or he might not. So little is known about the man who is harassing Detective Steve Carella with puzzling messages that it is hard to tell. But as soon as a pattern emerges, the detectives of the 87th are forced to hit the books and brush up on their Shakespeare -- because each new clue contains a line from one of his works. Unless they can crack the complicated riddles and beat the Deaf Man at his own cat-and-mouse game, someone is going to end up hurt, or something will be stolen -- or both. It's always so hard to tell with the Deaf Man. Ed McBain brings his most intelligent and devious criminal back to the 87th Precinct with a richly plotted and literary crime.

Date Added: 03/08/2018