"In this tour de force of historical narrative, Jonathan Ree tells the astonishing story of the plight of the deaf from the sixteenth century to the present. He explores the great debates about deafness and its 'cure,' from the 'oralists' who believed that the deaf should be forced to speak, to the 'gesturalists' who advocated sign-language and even a separate homeland for the deaf.

But these debates, as Ree shows in illuminating detail, were distorted by systematic misunderstandings of the nature of language and the five senses. Ree traces the botched attempts to make language visible, and he charts the tortuous progress and final recognition of sign systems as natural languages in their own right."--BOOK JACKET.