Like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, this is a fascinating voyage into a strange and wonderful land, a provocative meditation on communication, biology, adaptation, and culture. In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks turns his attention to the subject of deafness, and the result is a deeply felt portrait of a minority struggling for recognition and respect — a minority with its own rich, sometimes astonishing, culture and unique visual language, an extraordinary mode of communication that tells us much about the basis of language in hearing people as well. Seeing Voices is, as Studs Terkel has written, "an exquisite, as well as revelatory, work."
Seeing Voices explores the phenomenon of music created in a signed language and argues that music can exist beyond sound and the sense of hearing, instead involving all of our senses, including vision and touch. Using a blend of tools from music theory, cognitive science, musicology, and ethnography, author Anabel Maler presents the history of music in Deaf culture from the early nineteenth century, contextualizes contemporary Deaf music through ethnographic interviews with Deaf musicians, and provides detailed analyses of a wide variety of genres of sign language music.
The breakdown of traditional African values and the consequences of disconnection from African ancestral beliefs are examined in this attempt to understand the vicious cycle of community violence.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From “the poet laureate of medicine" (The New York Times) and the author of the classic The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat comes a fascinating exploration of the remarkable, unpredictable ways that our brains cope with the loss of sight by finding rich new forms of perception. “Elaborate and gorgeously detailed.... Again and again, Sacks invites readers to imagine their way into minds unlike their own, encouraging a radical form of empathy.” —Los Angeles Times With compassion and insight, Dr. Oliver Sacks again illuminates the mysteries of the brain by introducing us to some remarkable characters, including Pat, who remains a vivacious communicator despite the stroke that deprives her of speech, and Howard, a novelist who loses the ability to read. Sacks investigates those who can see perfectly well but are unable to recognize faces, even those of their own children. He describes totally blind people who navigate by touch and smell; and others who, ironically, become hyper-visual. Finally, he recounts his own battle with an eye tumor and the strange visual symptoms it caused. As he has done in classics like The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Awakenings, Dr. Sacks shows us that medicine is both an art and a science, and that our ability to imagine what it is to see with another person's mind is what makes us truly human.
Did You Hear That? Help for Children Who Hear Voices is about five very different children who share one thing in common — hearing voices and seeing things that are not there.Susie is a 9-year-old who keeps her challenges with auditory and visual hallucinations a secret until a teacher alerts her parents of her difficulties at school. With compassion, empathy, love and understanding, Susie's parents encourage her to see a counselor. Susie builds trust and rapport with her counselor, which finally allows her to share her well-guarded secret. After divulging what has been troubling her for years, with her counselor's help, she discovers that she is not the only one in the world who struggles with voices.Susie then introduces readers to four other children of different ethnicities, ages, backgrounds, talents and interests who also hear voices. All of the children share with readers their challenges with voices and personal life circumstances that contributed to them hearing voices. Then they go on to speak about their personal choices regarding what role they want voices to have in their lives and how counselors helped them achieve their individual goals.Did You Hear That? is a beautifully illustrated practical therapeutic storybook for psychologists, psychiatrists and mental health practitioners treating children with auditory and visual hallucinations. While it normalizes the experience and assists children in seeking professional help, it is also an easy to understand and user-friendly guide for concerned parents, teachers, pediatricians and allied health professionals.
Voice Work: Art and Science in Changing Voices is a key work that addresses the theoretical and experiential aspects common to the practical vocal work of the three major voice practitioner professions - voice training, singing teaching, and speech and language pathology. The first half of the book describes the nature of voice work along the normal-abnormal voice continuum, reviews ways in which the mechanism and function of the voice can be explored, and introduces the reader to an original model of voice assessment, suitable for all voice practitioners. The second half describes the theory behind core aspects of voice and provides an extensive range of related practical voice work ideas. Throughout the book, there are a number of case studies drawn from the author's own experiences and a companion website, providing audio clips to illustrate aspects of the text, can be found at www.wiley.com/go/shewell.
