The Deaf Heart

I really liked this book. Very easy to read. I am Deaf and I know what is like to survived in the hearing world back in the 80???s. I would recommend that everyone should read this book especially people who can hear.

This book is about growing up as a educated deaf person in a hearing world, and communicating mostly by lipreading and by ASL when the occasion arises. It's about the education of a Registered Biological Photographer, a profession that has become extinct. It portrays life in the early 1980's, and one gets a glimmer of life at N.T.I.D. and R.I.T. We follow the life of Dempsey Maxwell McCall (34;Max34;), a profoundly deaf young man, from his last few months before graduating from R.I.T. through his year-long residency to become a Registered Biological Photographer in the Department of Pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston Texas in 1982. Through stories told throughout the text, the reader learns that Max was born or became profoundly deaf early in life and grew up mainstreamed in the public schools. One gathers that he comes from a reasonably well-off family that fully accepted him. He relied on lipreading before R.I.T. and continued to do so as he makes his way into the hearing world of the medical school. The book alternates between vignettes of his experiences interacting with various characters as they enter his life, letters to his parents, short descriptions of biomedical photography assignments, and reproductions of photographs. The vignettes include mostly successful attempts to become the resident advisor of Photo House at R.I.T., to join the residency program, to find housing, to find friends and girlfriends, to complete assignments, and to attend social functions. He meets a variety of characters, both hearing and deaf, from all walks of life. Along the way he describes the issues that confront him, some the ordinary issues that anyone might encounter, but many that have a twist due to his hearing loss. These include misunderstandings on his part, on the other person's part, the lack of awareness that people have about folks with hearing loss, his own lack of education in social graces (compared to what he might have known had he been hearing), what to do about interviewing for jobs, and how to perform his job when requests and instructions are told to him verbally, and sometimes through a doctor's mask. He does not harp on being deaf, nor does he expect to be treated specially in any way except to help him communicate. He is a young man, coming of age in his profession and in life, of solid intellect, who expects to be able to perform his job well and to live a full life. This reviewer has lived a life much the same as described here. Though billed as a work of fiction, this novel so realistically describes the day-to-day issues and emotions confronting a mostly mainstreamed deaf young man that it may as well be a biography. Indeed, the author Willy Conley attended Towson High School in Maryland, the sister school to Dulaney Valley High school where Max went to school, as well as R.I.T., and he too became a Registered Biomedical Photographer at the U.T. Medical Branch. And though the stories told may differ in factual content from the story of Willy's life, one can only believe that something similar must have happened with the author, so honest and fresh do they appear.