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Searching... McMinnville Public Library | 305.9082 Bathurst | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
"Bathurst is a restless, curious writer... After reading this book, I found myself listening in a richer and more interested way." -- Guardian
A profound, beautifully written exploration of sound by a young woman who lost her hearing, then regained it.
In this surprising and moving book, award-winning writer Bella Bathurst shares the extraordinary true story of how she lost her hearing and eventually regained it and what she learned from her twelve years of deafness. Diving into a wide-ranging exploration of silence and noise, she interviews psychologists, ear surgeons, and professors to uncover fascinating insights about the science of sound. But she also speaks with ordinary people who are deaf or have lost their hearing, including musicians, war veterans, and factory workers, to offer a perceptive, thought-provoking look at what sound means to us.
If sight gives us the world, then hearing--or our ability to listen--gives us our connections with other people. But, as this smart, funny, and profoundly honest examination reveals, our relationship with sound is both more personal and far more complex than we might expect.
Author Notes
Bella Bathurst is a writer, photojournalist, and furniture maker. She has written four nonfiction books, including The Lighthouse Stevensons, which won the 1999 Somerset Maugham Award, and a novel, Special, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Observer, and many other outlets.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this fascinating memoir, British novelist Bathurst (Special) writes of losing and regaining her hearing over the course of 12 years beginning in 1998. At age 27, Bathurst began to realize she was losing her hearing, and she explains how, feeling embarrassed and ashamed, she tried to hide her hearing loss. For a while, her life was a struggle: telephone conversations became difficult, and participation in social interactions in noisy restaurants became impossible (the wrong dishes would come out and the strain exhausted her). In addition to telling her own story, Bathurst discusses wellknown figures from history and how they dealt with the loss of their hearing, such as Ludwig van Beethoven, who, in his own words, "was soon compelled to withdraw myself, to live life alone." These tidbits occasionally interrupt her own story. Gradually, however, she accepted her condition and met others suffering from hearing loss. In 2009, Bathurst, seeing her regular audiologist, learned the real cause of her hearing loss was a condition called otosclerosis (as her hearing worsened, the doctor was able to pinpoint the reason); after surgery, her hearing was restored and "everything was bigger than I had the capacity to express." For those who struggle with hearing loss, Bathurst's affecting memoir will enlighten and educate. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A memoir of hearing loss and what the author learned about the subject in general through her unexpected recovery from it.A good writer knows material when it presents itself, and Bathurst (The Bicycle Book, 2011, etc.) is a very good writer. In 2004, when she found herself "not completely deaf, just down to about 30 percent of normal hearing," she recognized that she had a rich vein to minethough perhaps not immediately, for she was pretty much in denial. Hearing loss was for the old and infirm, and she was neither. She resisted hearing aids, and she went about her journalistic work as if nothing were amiss. It was only later, when transcribing interviews, that she would recognize the gaps of incomprehension, realizing that she had failed to pick up on verbal cues her subjects had given her and that she had proceeded to ask questions that had nothing to do with the previous response. She experienced depression, and she learned how common it is to try to hide the condition. "If I had behaved like an island, then why the hell should it be a surprise when I became one?" she asks, referring to the way she held others at arm's length, accused of not really listening to them even when her hearing had been at full strength. "As it happened, it turned out to be a very overcrowded island. Though I didn't realize it at the time deafness is a very common problem, as is not talking about deafness." The author surveys the fields where hearing is most threatened, from music to the military, and why society as a whole often ignores it. Bathurst writes with a command of the way words sound: "And under it all the susurration of the sea itself," she writes of a sailing expedition imperiled by her limited hearing. "The shush it makes as it slides along the hull, fast or slow, urgent or gentle, its mesmerizing endlessness."An illuminating memoir of hearing lost and found. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
You don't know what you've got ' til it's gone, sang Joni Mitchell in Ladies of the Canyon (1970), a sentiment fellow Canadian Bathurst's engrossing journey proves. As her hearing diminished, she did what any sensible, evolved adult would do ignored the problem. Even though her unacknowledged disability endangered lives on a small boat in a storm when she didn't hear shouted steering directions from the veteran boater wrangling the sail. Ashamed, Bathurst recalls she couldn't face my own faults in not hearing him. Serious head injuries in 1990 and 1997 exacerbated the loss, forcing a 1998 audiology consultation, resulting in her getting analog hearing aids, blocky lumps of plastic, courtesy of National Health Services. Bathurst provides technical information on hearing and aids with admirable smoothness so mainstream readers can comprehend her fear, denial, mental distress, eventual acceptance, successful use of privately purchased digital aids, and "exaltation" over her regaining her hearing via laser microsurgeries after 12 years of loss. Further Reading rounds out this absorbing account.--Whitney Scott Copyright 2018 Booklist
Table of Contents
| 1 Sailing | p. 1 |
| 2 Hearing | p. 25 |
| 3 Aid | p. 37 |
| 4 Loss | p. 48 |
| 5 Conduction | p. 66 |
| 6 Rock | p. 78 |
| 7 Acoustics | p. 95 |
| 8 Silence | p. 113 |
| 9 Distortion | p. 122 |
| 10 Sign | p. 145 |
| 11 Vision | p. 161 |
| 12 Surfacing | p. 174 |
| 13 Listening | p. 190 |
| 14 Music | p. 200 |
| Further Reading | p. 203 |
| Acknowledgements | p. 209 |