Special Collections

Jessi's Secret Language

The hit series is back, to charm and inspire another generation of baby-sittersJessi knows a secret language! She learned it from Matt Braddock, the BSC's newest charge. Matt's been deaf since birth, and he uses sign language to speak. Since Jessi is Matt's baby-sitter, she's been using sign language, too.Soon all the kids in Stoneybrook want to learn to sign . . . which keeps the Baby-sitters busy. Jessi's the busiest of all: she working on another secret just for Matt. Will she be able to keep the secret and pull off her special event?The best friends you'll ever have--with classic BSC covers and a letter from Ann M. Martin!

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Kicking Up Dirt

At nineteen, Ashley Fiolek is already the top female competitor in a tough men's sport: motocross, a form of off-road motorcycle racing that is one of the most competitive and dangerous extreme sports in the world. Since going pro in late 2007, Fiolek has taken gold at the X Games, won the American Women's Motocross Championship twice, and become the first woman in American motocross history to be signed to a factory team—the highest echelon of industry backing. But Fiolek's rise has not come without obstacles. Fiolek was born profoundly deaf, a handicap that makes everyday life difficult—and competition on the track downright dangerous. Originally misdiagnosed as "mildly retarded," she was a painfully shy and introverted child—until her parents introduced her to the world of dirt bikes, which helped her escape the silence in her head and connect with others who shared her passion. She began racing at seven, and as her successes grew through hard work and no small number of broken bones, so did her confidence.Fiolek has never believed her disability should stand in the way of her dreams. Nor has she allowed her gender to limit her career—motocross historically has been a men's sport, but with the love and support of her dirt-obsessed family, including her "Grandpa Motorcycle," her little brother, Kicker, and her dogs, Turbo and Rocco, Ashley has emerged as one of the sport's most talked-about stars, changing the way the entire industry views women. Armed with her extraordinary talent, contagious grin, and deep faith in God, Fiolek continues to venture into unknown territory, relentlessly pushing herself—and women's motocross—to ever-greater heights.Kicking Up Dirt is a remarkable, inspiring tale of a young woman's courage and determination to succeed in the face of truly challenging obstacles.

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

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

A Journey into the Deaf-world

An introduction to the lives, language, and culture of the Deaf World, the signing community in the US. Conversations with deaf people reveal concepts central to the Deaf World, while overviews of the history, culture, and political agenda of the Deaf World provide details on the education of deaf children, deaf culture worldwide, and the ways in which technology helps and hinders deaf people. For students in hearing disorders, deaf studies, audiology, and speech pathology, and for general readers.

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

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

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

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

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

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers' finest work, an enduring masterpiece first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types of misfits in a Georgia mill town during the 1930s. Each one yearns for escape from small town life.

When Singer's mute companion goes insane, Singer moves into the Kelly house, where Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (and loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music. Wonderfully attuned to the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition, and with a deft sense for racial tensions in the South, McCullers spins a haunting, unforgettable story that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated -- and, through Mick Kelly, gives voice to the quiet, intensely personal search for beauty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In This Sign

Janice and Abel are a deaf couple. Their daughter can hear, and becomes their interpreter from a very early age. The parents are ashamed of their sign language and won't sign in public, only at the deaf club or with deaf friends. The daughter is interpreting phone calls, medical and banking appointments, legal and other situations long before she understands them. This is a historical novel, of a deaf world that no longer exists, but is accurate for its time.

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

Lanceheim

A fast-paced literary and psychological drama in which the trials and tribulations of a group of stuffed animals illuminate the moral and philosophical dilemmas we all share

While finishing what was to be his greatest symphony, famed composer Reuben Walrus discovers he is going deaf. Desperate to stave off the encroaching silence, he embarks on an odyssey to find a fabled creature named Maximilian, rumored to have healing powers but only traceable via an underground network. But as Reuben gets closer to the truth, he must ask himself: Just who-or what-is Maximilian?

The story of the legendary creature is recorded by Wolf Diaz, Maximilian's oldest friend and most loyal follower. Oddly, unlike the other stuffed animals of Mollisan Town, Maximilian did not arrive by green delivery truck. He cannot be identified as any particular species and is made from a material unlike any other with almost invisible seams. And most puzzling, he grows in size. As Maximilian matures, he begins to preach odd parables, attracting a legion of followers hoping to learn from his teachings. But his believers aren't the only stuffed animals paying attention as his growing influence threatens the power of the darker forces currently ruling Mollisan Town. Now Maximilian is in hiding . . . and time is running out for Reuben to find him. As his search widens, the composer encounters a detective mouse, a giraffe who swears Maximilian miraculously cured his stomach cancer, and a mink who may hold the key to Reuben's salvation. But it's a race against time as Reuben's world steadily goes silent, and his desperation may ultimately lead to his undoing.

With biting prose and compelling plot twists, Lanceheim is a tour de force all the way to the last sentence, as the true natures of Wolf Diaz, Reuben Walrus, and Maximilian are uncovered. Through the stuffed animals living in the imaginative world he introduced in the critically acclaimed Amberville, Tim Davys explores the hopes and fears, strengths and weaknesses, that define humanity as he pens a story that is both gripping and extraordinary.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Leading Ladies

Megan's fourth-grade class is putting on their own original musical based on the book The Wizard of Oz, and Megan wants to be the star of the show and play Dorothy. Since she's deaf, she will sign the songs for her audition. However, a problem develops when Lizzie, her best friend from camp, transfers from her all-deaf school to Megan's class - and signs the same two songs that Megan was going to do! Luckily, Megan has some other ideas up her sleeve...

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Listening with My Heart

Heather Whitestone. Her name has become synonymous with incredible determination and unprecedented achievement. In Listening with My Heart, Heather tells her own story and the stories of others who have inspired her, proving that with hard work, perseverance, and faith, each of us can move mountains.

Profoundly deaf since she was eighteen months old, Heather strove to live a normal life, and refused to listen to the voices of discouragement that many of us so often hear, no matter what problems confront us. She wouldn't listen to the doctor who said she wouldn't develop beyond third-grade abilities, or to those who said she would never dance ballet, or even speak. She did, however, hear the encouraging spirit of her family and followed the guidance of her own heart's dreams.

Struggling through her difficulties, she was sustained by every success--no matter how small--and ultimately became Miss America 1995. Though she is disabled, her incredible gifts have inspired many throughout the world, and in Listening with My Heart she at last shares her life-changing wisdom.

Date Added: 03/08/2018

Lazarus Rising

John Howard spent decades under media scrutiny, and while his credentials as a political leader, devoted family man and sports tragic are beyond dispute, in this autobiography he reveals much more about himself. In Lazarus Rising, Howard traces his personal and political journey, from childhood in the post-World War II era through to the present day, painting a fascinating picture of a changing Australia. We see the youngster who had to overcome serious deafness and who latched onto the family passion for current affairs and politics. From school debating, to a legal career, to the Liberal Party and life with Janette, it all seemed such a natural progression. Yet no one would say that Howard had it easy; not when his own colleagues sidelined him . . . twice. An economic radical and social conservative, John Howard's ideology united many Australians and divided just as many others. Long before he attained the role of prime minister, he first had to convince his fellow Liberals that he was the man they needed. To do that, he had to tough it out; it took several attempts and many years biding his time. When he finally got his turn to take on the ALP, he proved wrong all his doubters, and showed a whole nation that it had been a mistake ever to underestimate John Howard. He led the Liberal Party to victory in four elections and became the second-longest-serving PM in the nation's history.Lazarus Rising is history seen through the eyes of the ultimate insider; an account of a 30-year political career. No prime minister of modern times has reshaped Australia and its place in the world as forcefully as John Howard. As part of his reform agenda he privatized Telstra, dismantled excessive union power and compulsory trade union membership, instituted the unpopular Goods and Services Tax, and established the ‘work for the dole' scheme. Then there are the insights into political leadership and character, the stuff that drives history. Without his deep reserves of resilience - and the support of a strong wife and loving family - there would have been no Prime Minister John Howard walking the world stage. He tells us how he responded on issues vital to Australia, such as gun control, the aftermath of 9/11, Iraq and the rising tide of asylum-seekers. He also shares his thoughts on his former Treasurer and leadership aspirant, Peter Costello, and the Rudd-Gillard debate.Lazarus Rising takes us through the life and motivations of John Howard and through the forces which have changed and shaped both him and the country he led for 11 years.

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

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