Articulate A deaf memoir of voice

In this impressive debut, Kolb reflects on being deaf in a hearing world. Born in 1990, the same year the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, Kolb writes firsthand about the successes and shortcomings of its attempts to bridge accessibility gaps in American life. She grew up in New Mexico with hearing parents and a hearing sister, and attended the New Mexico School for the Deaf's preschool in Albuquerque before being shunted to public school in first grade, which led her to cherish "those hazy days at the preschool where everyone had known how to sign." As Kolb charts her journey to Stanford, then Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and Emory University as a PhD candidate, she goes deep on the methods of communication that aided her, mixing cultural histories of American Sign Language, lipreading, and finger spelling--including an account of attempts to ban ASL in U.S. schools for deaf students by so-called "oralists"--with personal anecdotes about the practices. Along the way, Kolb chronicles the stigma, both obvious and subtle, that deaf people endure from hearing individuals and their deaf peers alike. (In one scene, her classmates decry an acquaintance's cochlear implants: "Where's your Deaf pride?") Accessible, fascinating, and heartfelt, this thorough examination of contemporary Deafness moves and edifies in equal measure. It's required reading. Agent: Lydia Wills, Lydia Wills LLC. (Sept.)

A deaf writer explores her relationship with language. At the age of 23, author Kolb became "the first signing deaf person" to be awarded a Rhodes scholarship. Although she revels in this victory, she is disappointed with the media's framing of her story as a triumph over her disability. She writes, "Despite. This is the word that jars me most. As if excellence and fulfillment are somehow at odds with living in a deaf body." Throughout her life, Kolb resists the idea that her deafness is an obstacle rather than an integral part of her humanity. As a child, she works hard at speech therapy, not because she wants to fit into the hearing world, but because she craves control. She writes, "If I spoke well, then those words would forever be my own. I would prove myself to be the success I wanted to be. I would never again need anyone or anything else to speak for me." Navigating landscapes ranging from deaf summer camp to college life before and after receiving a cochlear implant transforms Kolb's sense of self and her relationship with her deafness. Being deaf, she writes, is about learning that "there was always a way to sort out what someone else had meant," treating the body as "the text," and understanding that "speech isn't the real measure of one's intimacy with English, nor is English the real measure of one's intimacy with language." Kolb masterfully uses her life story as a springboard for reframing deafness and, more broadly, disability from an assets approach. Her lyrical prose and trenchant analysis upend non-deaf people's limited conceptions of language, exposing the limitations of a world defined by hearing. An exquisite memoir about deafness that brilliantly shatters our ideas about language. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.