Overview

"For more than a quarter of a century, Ildefonso, a Mexican Indian, lived in total isolation, set apart from the rest of the world. He wasn't a political prisoner or a social recluse, he was simply born deaf and had never been taught even the most basic language. Susan Schaller, then a twenty-four-year-old graduate student, encountered him in a class for the deaf where she had been sent as an interpreter and where he sat isolated, since he knew no sign language. She found him obviously intelligent and sharply observant but unable to communicate, and she felt compelled to bring him to a comprehension of words. ""A Man without Words"" vividly conveys the challenge, the frustrations, and the exhilaration of opening the mind of a congenitally deaf person to the concept of language."

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9780520202658

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Reviews

Her passionate, powerful book is both eloquent and elegant. --Andrea Barrett, Washington Post Book World

Schaller, an interpreter and teacher of American Sign Language (ASL), tells the extraordinary story of a deaf Mexican man who learns his first language at the age of 27. In some ways, this reads like a book-length version of one of Oliver Sacks's case-studies of psychological breakthrough (and indeed, Sacks provides a foreword here). The story is simple: Schaller takes a job in a program to aid the deaf and soon encounters Idlefonso, a 27-year-old deaf Mexican rocking silently in a comer of her classroom. After a week of face-to-face work, Schaller transmits to him the idea of language: The whites of his eyes expanded as if in terror. . .He had entered the universe of humanity, discovered the communion of minds. After the breakthrough come months of painstaking progress, culminating in a reunion between teacher and pupil after seven years absence - Idlefonso is now an animated, articulate speaker of sign language. Schaller also recalls past efforts to deal with languageless people (Kaspar Hauser, Ishi, wolf children), and raps the academic establishment for sloppy scholarship on language acquisition - above all, for the cherished but misguided notion that language can only be learned in childhood. Beautifully written, with a nimble interweaving of personal anecdote and historical background. This sits well alongside other classic studies on the culture of the deaf, including Sacks's own Seeing Voices. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Susan Schaller is a teacher of American Sign Language affiliated with the World Federation of the Deaf and the founder of In the Name of Deaf Adults (NaDA).

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