Shouting Won't Help
Why I--and 50 Million Other Americans--Can't Hear You
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4.1 • 8 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
For twenty-two years, Katherine Bouton had a secret that grew harder to keep every day. An editor at The New York Times, at daily editorial meetings she couldn't hear what her colleagues were saying. She had gone profoundly deaf in her left ear; her right was getting worse. As she once put it, she was "the kind of person who might have used an ear trumpet in the nineteenth century."
Audiologists agree that we're experiencing a national epidemic of hearing impairment. At present, 50 million Americans suffer some degree of hearing loss—17 percent of the population. And hearing loss is not exclusively a product of growing old. The usual onset is between the ages of nineteen and forty-four, and in many cases the cause is unknown.
Shouting Won't Help is a deftly written, deeply felt look at a widespread and misunderstood phenomenon. In the style of Jerome Groopman and Atul Gawande, and using her experience as a guide, Bouton examines the problem personally, psychologically, and physiologically. She speaks with doctors, audiologists, and neurobiologists, and with a variety of people afflicted with midlife hearing loss, braiding their stories with her own to illuminate the startling effects of the condition.
The result is a surprisingly engaging account of what it's like to live with an invisible disability—and a robust prescription for our nation's increasing problem with deafness.
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though she's never been able to pinpoint the cause of her affliction, former New York Times senior editor Bouton remembers the day she began to lose her hearing and suddenly found herself among the ranks of the estimated 275 million people around the world with some type of hearing impairment. She recounts her story and expands it to include the experiences of others (each chapter closes with a profile of a person with a hearing disability, including a British opera singer, a psychoanalyst, and a professor), crafting a study rich in detail and broad in scope that touches on the intricacies of cochlear implants and the increasing amount of ambient noise in our society, as well as the shame, frustration, and guilt the hearing impaired face in the workplace and in private conversation. This 360 degree approach to the topic makes this more than just a memoir; it's a unique method of storytelling that educates, engages, and occasionally enrages the reader, who will come away with a new understanding of the widespread and often puzzling topic of hearing loss and how it can be overcome, or at least managed.
Customer Reviews
Shouting won't help
The book is brand new, and I have not finished it yet. Nevertheless, I can report this is a great book. Katherine describes in language all can understand what hearing loss is like. She describes exactly what I am experiencing. It is as though she interviewed me and turned around and described what I said. Then she goes on to explain why these things are happening. I see so many people with hearing devices and they act like they are normal. I feel like I am the only one experiencing what Katherine describes. So far it is a very good book, and I think the rest of the book will be just as good.