What We Are Reading Today: The Invention of Miracles by Katie Booth

What We Are Reading Today: The Invention of Miracles by Katie Booth

This is a revelatory revisionist biography of Alexander Graham Bell — renowned inventor of the telephone and hated enemy of the deaf community.

Bell has long been a polarizing figure, admired as the brilliant inventor of the telephone and other extraordinary devices, but also despised as the leading exponent of oralism, the movement that pressured deaf people to learn speech and, more important, not to learn sign language. 

The Invention of Miracles “tells the dual stories of Bell’s remarkable, world-changing invention and his dangerous ethnocide of deaf culture and language. It also charts the rise of deaf activism and tells the triumphant tale of a community reclaiming a once-forbidden language,” said a review on goodreads.com.

It also charts the rise of deaf activism and tells the triumphant tale of a community reclaiming a once-forbidden language.

“Inspired by her mixed hearing/Deaf family, author Katie Booth has researched this story for over a decade, poring over Bell’s papers, Library of Congress archives, and the records of deaf schools around America,” the review added.

What We Are Reading Today: The Free World

Updated 01 May 2021

May 01, 2021 01:22

Author: Louis Menand

In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the