Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World

by Leah Hager Cohen

This portrait of New York's Lexington School for the Deaf is not just a work of journalism. It is also a memoir, since Leah Hager Cohen grew up on the school's campus and her father is its superintendent. As a hearing person raised among the deaf, Cohen appreciates both the intimate textures of that silent world and the gulf that separates it from our own.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Disability, Biography, History, Sociology, Book Club

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Leah Hager Cohen has written four non-fiction books, including Train Go Sorry and Glass, Paper, Beans, and four novels, including House Lights and The Grief of Others.

She serves as the Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross, and teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review.

Reviews

[Unwisely · Rating 4 out of 5]

This subtitle is slightly misleading; it's mostly the story of students at a school for the deaf in New York City. It manages to do an excellent job of discussing various conflicting factions and attitudes that swirl around education of the deaf without taking sides or demonizing any one group. Due to a a childhood friend who was deaf, I have a long-standing personal interest in deaf issues, and this book really helped me locate her in the context of what was going on politically at the time (a context of which I was blissfully ignorant). So there was a great stroll down memory lane for me.

Especially after just finishing Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice, I found it really neat because the students have such intersectionally interesting lives. If this were a sitcom, the character would be deaf, but would otherwise be white, middle-to-upper class, native-born, etc etc. But two of the main students were a black, lower-class, deaf man and a Jewish immigrant woman, i.e., real people.

I really, really liked this book. But I couldn't give the book five stars, because I couldn't get past the narration. It's in a third-person omniscient narrative, which makes sense in a fantasy novel, where the author has access to people's thoughts, but in a non-fiction book was confusing. Also, it wasn't clear how or why the author had the access that she presumably had - in books like Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers or Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities the author gave a little introduction. This lack of any placing information caused me to ding it a star.

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had this book on my shelf for several years before finally getting around to reading it. For me, it is such a joy when an author can make a non-fiction book compelling enough to me that I read all the way through it, just as engrossed as if it were a novel. This book definitely fit that description. The story of the Lexington School, the students and staff, is really fascinating. As much as a person disconnected from the deaf community can, I feel that I gained some understanding of the trials of growing up deaf in a hearing family, and of the joy of being a deaf person surrounded by a supportive deaf community and culture. Ms. Cohen, a hearing person, was immersed in the Lexington School and the deaf community much of her early life, but she doesn't pretend to understand everything, which made her writing all the more credible. The history of the evolution of the deaf culture and of the various controversies within the deaf community and between deaf and hearing groups was also so interesting, and was skillfully woven in among other parts of the story.

[Gaile · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although this is old hat to me, the arguments in this book rang true all through my life. This is about the Lexington School For The Deaf in New York City and how it had to change with the years and needs of incoming deaf students. The war between ASL and the oral method is well documented in this book. In the present day, deaf students are coming from sub cultures and immigrants from the middle east and Russia. Mainstreaming is now the new oral method.There is also the debate on the Cochlear implant.
I was born and raised in deaf culture, have always been around deaf people.
My deaf husband and I raised four children. I have deaf grandchildren.
Although I have never seen the Lexington School For The Deaf, I have friends who were once students there. I have lived everything written in this book.

[Paige · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book...kind of annoyed me. Leah Hager Cohen is a decent writer, but she doesn't have a strong story to tell here. Or she does--at least, I believe there's several good stories to tell--but she doesn't actually do that to my satisfaction.

This subtitle of this book is "Inside a Deaf World." Wrong. The author is hearing herself, which may not have presented too much of a problem if she had had more focus, but to me the book came off as very "me me me me me." We hear about how badly Cohen wanted/wants to be deaf, how she grew up on the property of a school for the deaf (until she was seven), we hear about her family (which, to be fair, does include deaf grandparents), we hear about the fleas in the apartment she moved into, we hear about the deaf guy she dated, we hear about her life & choices, how she eats cookies... Meanwhile she is telling the story of a school for the deaf, and highlighting the stories of two of the students as well as the story of her father, the superintendent of the school.

Here's the thing: the deaf school, the stories of the students there, deaf culture, controversies within the deaf community--these are all really worthy topics. Even the story of her romantic relationship with a deaf person and the story of her (short) stint interpreter are things I would totally be interested in reading about. But they were all just thrown together, like they were given equal weight. It was like she talked about her two months as an interpreter as much as she talked about other, way larger, more important issues. This maybe wouldn't bother me so much but I've heard it touted as this awesome thing, and on the back cover of the book where it lists the genre/section it goes in, it says "Education." Urgh. It doesn't cite a single source, despite being peppered with statistics and things that are definitely not common knowledge.

At times I felt like she was trying really hard to be poignant or sentimental and it just did not elicit that response in me. The parts where she deals with the school and the students' stories was written in such a way that was unclear whether she was there in person witnessing this or if it was related to her later on--in either case, it seemed overdone and oddly omniscient. It was distracting!!

On the positive side, I did learn some new things. It was quick and pretty fun to read--engaging, I suppose. This book has been out for 20 years though, so I wonder how much has changed for the deaf community, how much of it is out of date. I know several people who have been "mainstreamed," and I know a couple interpreters for mainstreamed children. I think it would have been more compelling from a deaf point of view.

[Fiona · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book consists of the memoirs of the author in relation to Lexington School for the Deaf, New York, whilst also following various students through their time at the school. I completely agree with Unwisely’s comment that the third-person omniscient narrative made the book confusing and feel like a novel.

Having read a few Books on Deaf Culture and the d/Deaf lived experience I found the format of this book refreshing. In terms of themes, however, I didn’t feel it made new ground, merely touched upon previously written about topics without too much discussion. Having said that, being written in 1995, perhaps it is more ground-breaking than I know. I did personally find the highlighting of the intersectionality of the d/Deaf experience an important point and well portrayed in this book. My only criticism of this book came early on:
“Some [deaf] students had been schooled with mentally retarded [sic] children”
The term “mentally retarded” being used here to conjure judgmental images to inspire pity for the deaf child grouped in with these other children. After all, “mentally retarded”, although possibly an acceptable term in 90's America, is a loaded, offensive and yet gloriously unspecific term.

Overall, I found the book an enjoyable read, not too difficult and with gentle reminders of d/Deaf discourse.

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve read that this book is beloved by the Deaf community. I found it a little disjointed and striving too hard to sound like a Tracy Kidder narrative (it was published in 1994), but it offers a good snapshot of Lexington School for the Deaf and the world of the Deaf in that generation. Cohen grew up as a hearing person in the Deaf community and she describes the pedagogical switch from oral-language based instruction to ASL at Lexington and other schools. I was interested in her personal experience learning ASL from a lover, and of working as an ASL translator for two months (she left because she didn't like the experience of being unacknowledged in conversations, of being a conduit and unable to participate - that was surprising to me, but she was very young at the time).

[Brad McKenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story of a hearing gal who's father (also hearing) is head master of the Lexington School for the Deaf. His own father was deaf and so the Cohen family is in a unique position as Deaf Culture blossoms in the 60s. For so long deaf people were forced to learn how to talk and read lips, hearing aids were forced on them whether or not the person actually had enough hearing to amplify. ASL was thought to be too primitive a language to be useful. All that changes though and this story traces a lot of those changes.

As someone with significant hearing loss and who has benefited greatly from hearing aids, it was striking to see that the fact that I use and rely on them makes me not just an outcast in the hearing community but also the deaf community. Another interesting item of note was that mainstreaming, i.e. forcing deaf kids to attend public schools with their hearing counterparts, is a bad thing. With other civil rights movements, integration is the benevolent word and segregation the malevolent one. Nothing could be further from the truth with deaf people. And as someone who struggled in school, I understand why. Think about how a classroom is set up, with rows of chairs arranged so there's nary a clear line of site to someone's mouth. Now think about how deaf and hard of hearing folks need to read lips to actually catch enough of what is being said to make sense of it. That can't happen when you're staring at the back of a speaker's hear of another head is blocking your view of the teacher. There are so many little things that hearing folks don't even think about that deaf folks can't function without. This book sheds some light on a lot of those things.

[RyanE. Erisman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I chose "Train Go Sorry" by Leah Hager Cohen, because I thought the perspective was interesting and made the book unique.
"Train Go Sorry" is about the author's life in lexington school for the deaf, however the author is not deaf. Leah Cohen's parents are the administrators and live above the school. Through out the story we hear about the other deaf children with every new chapter. The book truly lives up to its title, I feel fully immersed and actually "inside a deaf world".
Like I mentioned before I read the book for its interesting perspective and it is why I finished it, but it is also the only reason. After awhile about reading story after story the author's diction and syntax didn't connect with me and I found myself reading as a chore, not for enjoyment.
I gave this book 2 out of 5 stars because while it was enlightening it left me disappointed by the end and I couldn't say I "Liked it".

[gibbyreadsbooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to read this book for my ASL class and I will say I was pleasantly surprised. It was very informative and gave a great overview of the history of Deaf from the 60s-90s. This book mainly focused on people who attended, lived, or worked at Lexington School for the Deaf which is still one of the biggest oralism schools in the US. It touches on the politics and cultural differences among hearing and Deaf people. Overall I think it’s does provide a great insight into Deaf culture in the 1990s.

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating 4.5. These days, one of the reasons I read is to learn. I hope that whether the book is fiction or non-fiction it will give me insight into something I'm ignorant of. This book definitely delivered.

Using a school in New York, which the author has a connection to, and the faces of staff, students, and her own education within the deaf community, Leah Cohen helped educate me about the challenges, education, medical aids, politics, and triumphs of the deaf.

This book was always interesting, often fascinating, sometimes touching, and a bit sad. Some of the quotes I marked:

"It took a moment for the meaning of her broad, bluntly formed syllables to sink in. As a young deaf woman, she had been judged unfit, incapable even of naming her own children."

"And because deaf children do not acquire an aural, spoken language naturally -- they must be taught ever minute element that hearing children absorb effortlessly -- they are sent to school with no language system at all. A bit of English and a few crude homemade signs were the only tools that most of my classmates possessed for making sense of the world."

On Cochlear implants: "During implantation, the tiny hairs of the inner ear that normally activate the auditory nerve get torn and crushed. Once this has happened, the effects are irreversible; even if the device is removed, any residual hearing that might have existed will have been obliterated. So if the implant is unsuccessful -- the definition of success including not only healthy recovery from surgery but also learning how to interpret speech from the implant's electrical signals by working with rehabilitation specialists, who may include audiologists, speech-language pathologists, psychologists, and educators -- the child worn't ever be able to benefit from a regular hearing aid."

"The National Association of the Deaf rejects the representation of deaf people as having an impairment; it characterizes them instead as having enhanced vision. If we lived in a society that did not regard hearing people as the norm, these differences might not constitute deprivations. In fact, in a society that regarded deafness as the norm, it is likely that hearing people would be at a disadvantage. But hearing people dominate our society; it is hearing people' gaze that determines reality. Within this reality, deaf people are disabled."

[Teddy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Knap geschreven, het is in principe een non fictie boek maar ze schrijft de ervaringen van haarzelf en de studenten als een roman. Laat veel perspectieven en kanten van de dovenwereld zien, soms niet altijd even objectief maar wel mooi.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh man! I finished this book and forgot to journal on it. That's really frustrating, especially since only one of the things I wanted to say made it into notes. (The only one that did was "Saw there was a story on NPR this morning about Cochlear Implants Redefine What It Means To Be Deaf. http://www.npr.org/2012/04/08/1502458)

Being the daughter of a severely hearing impaired woman, and a woman who has hearing issues herself, I was very interested in reading this book. the historical bits were what grabbed me the most -- the founding of the LExingtion School for the deaf and it's early days. I also was moved by some of the stories, challenges, and sheer determination of the students written about in this book, but the history buff in me won out, and that's what I remember most.

I've spent 40 minutes on internet searching for the link to a marvelous show we saw in April, which featured the story of a deaf Jewish girl in Germany at the onset of WWII. (It originally aired on Mother's Day in 2011, I think.) If you have time, check out this link:

[Westcoast_girl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an excellent book for hearing people wanting to learn more about Deaf culture. Unlike other books on Deaf culture, this book is written by a hearing woman with hearing parents. However, she is intimately involved with Deaf people and their culture as a grandchild of a Deaf couple, an friend of many Deaf people, a past and present interpreter, and a past hearing resident of Lexington School for the Deaf.

The book can be read chronologically and all at once, or chapter by chapter, intermittently. I say this, but once you begin reading, you may not be able to put the book down.

The book follows several Lexington students, staff members, and alumni. Through the people's stories, Leah Cohen is able to illustrate the struggles that Deaf people face, the issues facing them, and the debates and arguments that are raging within Deaf culture and the hearing world. She is also able to show the beauty in signing, the special and somewhat hidden aspects of Deaf culture, and the brave people with incredible stories who live within Lexington's gates.

I think anyone and everyone should read this book.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoughtful and periodically very moving book exploring the students of an all-deaf high school in New York, written by the (hearing) granddaughter of one of its founding students and daughter of the current principal. I was very interested for awhile in deaf politics, with a deaf grandmother and other deaf relatives, so I found both the personal stories and the broader cultural overview interesting. Cohen explores the issues around oralism versus signed communication, relations with the hearing world, the advent of cochlear implant technologies, etc. with a great deal of nuance. The book is now quite dated (research from the early 1990s) but still fascinating.

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly recommended for anyone who has an interest in nonfiction, Deaf culture, or cultures in general. Train Go Sorry was a requirement for my ASL I class, and while I never would've picked it up on my own, I really enjoyed reading it.

[Gretchen Rubin]

A very interesting memoir of a woman who spent much of her childhood growing up in New York's famous Lexington School for the Deaf.

[Irishcoda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read Train Go Sorry: Inside A Deaf World by Leah Hager Cohen when it was first published and thought it was awesome. I was looking for a non fiction book to read for my November challenge and came across this book hiding on a lower shelf. It's been almost 30 years since I read it. At that time, I was a freelance interpreter for the deaf with years of experience in the mainstream school districts.

What means Train Go Sorry? It's a deaf idiom and is best translated as: You missed the boat. The book is about the missed connections between the deaf and the hearing worlds.

Cohen focuses on Lexington School for the Deaf in New York City. Her grandfather was deaf and an alumnus of Lexington. Her father was the superintendent for many years. She tells their stories and those of two graduating seniors, Sofia and James. She also tells a little of her own story as an interpreter. What was especially meaningful to me was that my mother and my aunt also went to Lexington.

Lexington was a strictly oral method school when it was first formed. Cohen outlined the history of deaf education. It began with sign language thanks to Thomas Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc. Gallaudet founded the college for the deaf named after him and he and Clerc set up a school for the deaf in Connecticut. Then hearing educators got involved, insisting that deaf people had to learn to speak and blend into the hearing community; that sign language was bestial and animalistic. The oral method began to predominate at schools for the deaf for years and years and decent equitable education went down the toilet.

Mom hated Lexington. She recounted horror stories of being slapped for using her hands to even just gesture or point naturally, being isolated if she was caught signing, and hour after boring hour in speech training. She never did learn to speak coherently and dropped out of school when she realized she wasn't learning anything of substance. She basically taught herself to read on a lower high school level and to write. Most deaf people lag way behind in English skills if they do not grow up with sign language. Deaf children of deaf parents are much more successful because they have language right from birth.

Cohen wrote about her grandfather's experiences, especially his last one in the hospital. It brought back so many memories. My mom fell on a flight of stairs and unknowingly broke ribs that punctured her lung. She was having difficulty breathing and I called for an ambulance. At the hospital, the registrar didn't want me to go into the emergency room with Mom. I was already an interpreter and familiar with the rights of deaf patients so I argued until I was blue in the face and they finally let me in. The doctor who examined her didn't understand deafness at all and strenuously objected to my interpreting because Mom watched me instead of him. He pushed me out of the cubicle and started shouting at Mom "Can you hear me? Can you hear me now?" After a couple of minutes of this, he opened the curtain and pulled me back in. However, he continued to complain throughout his assessment.

Oscar Cohen, the author's father, became superintendent at a time when deaf people began to assert their rights. Why did they have to learn to speak if they couldn't or didn't want to? American Sign Language (ASL) was recognized as a legitimate language, why couldn't they be educated in their native language? Why couldn't deaf professionals assume responsibility and leadership in the schools and at work? Why couldn't they be lawyers, doctors, astronauts and CEOs? Or whatever they wanted? I was in Washington DC for the whole Deaf President Now movement at Gallaudet. The hearing woman originally chosen to be president was replaced with a deaf man.
And the response from the medical community, which has always viewed deafness as a pathology? Cochlear implant! Let's drill holes in the skulls of children without their consent to destroy whatever was left of their auditory nerve to implant a device that might or might not help them be hearing? Cohen had a difficult path to walk as Lexington had to maneuver between being an all-oral school to one that used and included ASL.

The two students in the book, Sofia and James, had inspiring stories to tell. Sometimes their experiences were downright heart breaking as both realized they felt more at "home" in the dorms at Lexington where they could easily communicate with their friends, teachers, and counselors. At their families' homes, they were isolated and lonely. Family members didn't sign and they didn't communicate often. The two students were each lost at a dinner table with relatives, unable to follow conversations. I saw that happen to my parents growing up. They were on the fringes of family gatherings, smiling and nodding (and not understanding) and trying to follow what was going on until I was a teenager, "got it" and began interpreting at the gatherings.

This could turn into quite the memoir and I'm thinking about it. #booksiread #deafness

[Jason Pettus · Rating 4 out of 5]

As friends know, here at the age of 50 I've started learning American Sign Language (ASL) for the first time, and am doing a deep dive into the politics and culture of the Deaf community with a capital "D," as a way of compensating for my ever-decreasing hearing and hopefully opening a new avenue for my shrinking social life. (See my review of A Deaf Adult Speaks Out for a long explanation of what exactly "Deaf culture" is, and why it's so important to learn about before getting involved with the community.) This 1994 book, one of the "foundational texts" on modern Deaf culture recommended to me by Michelle Jay, founder of the StartASL.com online courses I'm currently taking, is mostly known for being one of the first (if not the first-ever) memoir about Deafness written by an actual MFA holder in creative writing, making it a much more literary and poetic manuscript than almost any other book on the subject that had been written up to then.

Author Leah Hager Cohen uses the first chapter to explain her own situation -- how she herself is hearing, but grew up on the campus of New York City's Lexington School for the Deaf because of both of her parents being full-time staffers there, spending her childhood jealous of all the Deaf students who seemed to have a special bond she would never be able to share -- then devotes each chapter after that to standalone essays examining a series of students who are currently attending there in the early 1990s. As such, then, the book is about a lot more than just Deaf culture issues -- it also looks at immigration (many of the students are refugees from the then-Communist Eastern Europe), Judaism, financial disparity and how this affects the American educational system, and a lot more. I'm not giving it a perfect score, because Cohen's prose is just a bit too flowery for me, and I found some of the chapters just a bit too much of a tedious slog to actually finish; but certainly this is one of the more beautiful books about Deaf issues ever written, now considered a classic in the genre and that provides a valuable window into a very specific time in history, after the "Deaf Pride Revolution" events of the late 1980s but before ASL had become an accepted part of mainstream American culture like it had by the 2000s. It comes recommended in this spirit, but with the advice to keep your expectations low so that you'll be pleasantly surprised, not build them up and inevitably be disappointed.

[Iseult · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting book to read, in part because of its datedness. However, I lost some respect for the author when she describes how she took a job as an interpreter even though she had no formal education and not enough real life experience. The program accepted those with no training, but she says she was an "adequate signer most of the time." For someone who respects the deaf community, does she really think that was acceptable? She says she needed a job, but according to her wikipedia, she graduated with a degree in literature, so why not use her degree to get a job she was qualified for and save up to take actual interpreting classes? I'm surprised she could be hired as an interpreter by a deaf association with just 2 years having any real signing instruction. Other than this, she seemed surprisingly aware of the intersecting civil rights issues when it comes to the deaf community. She didn't mention the psychological trauma that can occur when a deaf child is not exposed to ASL and cannot grasp English well enough, so that they have little language at all to express themselves. That's a vital reason why deaf people demand ASL as a first language, and that was left out of the discussion. I wish she had followed up after a year of Sophia and James going to college (now that I think of it, I don't recall her saying if Sophia even got into/went to Gallaudet!) I was surprised the school had no official language policy; it seemed like a shit show at times, with teachers not knowing ASL, kids not knowing ASL or English, not being able to guess the word or mime. Hopefully it's more together now. There seems to be such a big debate between either ASL or English, but they could teach ASL first so everyone has equal access to a language, and start English very early. In my opinion, bilingualism is key.

[Michael Thal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leah Hager Cohen grows up at the Lexington School for the Deaf, in Queens, New York, even though she has perfect hearing. Her father, Oscar, also hearing, is the director of child care and resides with his family in an apartment on the third floor of the southern wing of the building. Being one of the few hearing individuals at the school, Leah is surrounded by Deaf Culture and has a feeling, at a young age, she is “missing the boat”—a phrase translated into ASL as “Train go sorry.”

Eventually, Leah and her family move to Nyack, New York along the Hudson River, but Oscar continues working at Lexington as its superintendent. In her 322-page memoir, a unique mix of journalistic reporting and personal experience, the author provides deep insight into the Lexington School for the Deaf and its students, teachers, and administrators. She also puts a spotlight on two deaf students—Sofia, a Russian immigrant, and James, a poor African-American boy from the Bronx—to show the school’s diverse population.

Through Cohen’s experience growing up hearing at a school for the deaf, we get a unique perspective of Deaf Culture. Issues handled are the isolation problems deaf students have with their hearing families and how Deaf Culture is transmitted not by the family but by institutes for the deaf. It also discusses deaf history, Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, the only college in the world designed exclusively for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, and the Deaf President Now movement. Cohen discusses educational pedagogy on teaching the deaf such as oralism vs instruction in American Sign Language (ASL).

I highly recommend Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World to any Deaf person, ASL student, or individual who has a deaf friend or family member. The book is an eye-opener.

[CTEP]

Leah Hager Cohen's "Train Go Sorry" is at once a memoir and a novel. Having been raised in the halls of New York's Lexington School for the Deaf, where her father was superintendent, Hager Cohen offers readers both a reflection on the events of her life as well as testimonies from the students and staff at Lexington School. She follows the students' triumphs, their struggles, and their advances and fallbacks in both high school and college settings.

What struck me most about this book was the realization that among the deaf community, deafness is not considered a disability or a medical problem that can be fixed or altered. To many in the community, especially at the time of the book's happenings, deafness is a cultural signifier, a point of pride, and a source of a sort of collective consciousness. Recognizing my own biases in this particular setting, I mentally went through some of the events that I dealt with at MERC this year, and I realized that my own cultural "normal" set point immediately set me up to pity or misunderstand some of my students' situations, or at the very least misjudge their ability to cope and navigate certain events that to me were incredibly foreign. Overall, this book is an excellent reminder that oftentimes, when we choose to look in at a group of people rather than talk to them or learn from them, we will draw the absolute incorrect assumptions and conclusions from our observations.

[Sandy Brehl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is already more than 25 years old, and I have no doubt that more recent works would expand and explore more of the current practices and issues regarding the education and social development of Deaf individuals, as well as exploring the protest and political shifts within DEAF CULTURE, and centuries of bias and stereotypes about those who are deaf.

I found that the author's unique history as a hearing person with Deaf family heritage, immersion within a legacy public education standard that relied exclusively on Oralism, and gradual development of both skill and understanding related to ASL and other manual communications allowed a deeply authentic voice, while she acknowledges the limitations of her own perspectives.

My professional and personal experiences and awarenesses related to all of the above may be more extensive than that of some readers, but is only the shallowest of experiences as compared to lived lives. Even so, this felt seriously informative, and was written about actual people in chapters/themes/character-phases that made it highly accessible and brought "big issues" into tight focus. In that sense it is very specific, and yet the broad aspects it addresses are important for everyone to read and explore.

[Kari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book to think about in the context of who gets to tell the stories of a specific community, and especially resonates with the part of the book where the author talks about how sign language is the only language where interpreters are not (or very rarely) native speakers of one of the languages. Hager Cohen clearly has a deep connection to the community, and recognizes the

I appreciated the insight into a variety of aspects of the Deaf community, and the look at the intersectionality between deafness, race, country of origin, class, etc.

My biggest issue with the book is the (beautifully) descriptive language throughout. It's not clear that the author was present, and to describe the sights, sounds, smells of many moments often caused me to stop and wonder about how the book was written. Even interviewing some of the subjects would not have resulted in details like crescents of sweat around a parent's eyes. I think these details really add to the atmosphere of the book, but seem out of place.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book, which is about the Lexington School for the Deaf in New York City and several of its students. The author's grandparents are deaf and her father is the school's superintendent, and she lived at the school until she was 7. There is a lot of history here, and she delves into many of the issues surrounding the deaf community such as learning ASL verses learning to speak English aloud and reading lips. She touches on the Deaf President Now story at Gallaudet University and also discusses her two-month stint as an deaf interpreter. It's a fascinating book for a hearing person such as myself. The only downside was that it was written in 1992, no fault of the author, but it completely misses the Internet era and how that may have affected the deaf community. Unfortunate.

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone with a degree in Deaf Studies, I picked up this book because I always like learning more about deaf culture. This book does a great job addressing the tensions and debates within the deaf community -- should we allow mainstreaming in schools or are deaf schools best? Should we use cochlear implants on children or does that breach their rights? Are hearing people "allowed" into the deaf world just because they know ASL?

This book covered a lot of what I learned in college courses and I even learned a few things I didn't know previously! My only issue was that I felt like the author had stories to tell, but told them in a journalistic manner....which made this non-fiction feel cold and distant.

If you are interested in deaf culture or ASL or have connections to the deaf community, you'll like this!

[Marni · Rating 4 out of 5]

One reason I was interested in reading this book is because I lived near the Lexington School for several years when I was in elementary school, and my younger sister attended the integrated preschool program there in the late 1960s. I found it a fascinating window onto the world of the deaf community, albeit from the perspective of a hearing person who grew up surrounded by that community. It was an interesting combination of memoir and stories about the school, the deaf community in general, and individual students following their own paths. Having read this book, I find myself wanting to read some accounts by deaf authors, to learn about their perspectives first-hand rather than through the eyes (and ears) of a hearing writer. Also, this book was written in the 1990s, and I'd like to learn about what has changed with respect to education for deaf people since then.

[Zane Carey · Rating 4 out of 5]

i can definitely see why this book is mandatory reading for intro to asl at my college, and i'm glad I chose to read it before the class began. this is one of the first books ive read that has touched on the friction of advocating for communities you will never be apart of and learning to live with the discomfort. i loved the in depth look into some peoples stories. they left me with a feeling of warmth, and there is nothing more touching than reading about intersectional experiences. sofia's growth in her faith will be a story that sticks with me long after this book does. and the kicker is this book is older than me(published in 1995), imagine how Deaf culture has changed since then? guess i have more reading to do

[Mia Ruefenacht · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating and beautifully written book combining personal narratives with discussions of more general issues facing the deaf community. It doesn't go very in depth with any discussion, but is more of a general overview. The combination of the personal with the general was quite effective and it drew me into the book. The prose style is quite beautiful by itself-I love the way it describes New York City. It often has a sort of melancholic, bittersweet tone which I found quite touching and appropriate given that a main theme of the book, as expressed in the title, is missed connections.

[JANEY MCGEARY · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cohen is an excellent writer, generous with description without ever straying into overdone-land. She is very open and insightful about her own experience as a hearing person in a deaf world, and does not give more weight to one side of the debate than the other. She is thoughtful and thorough in explaining each point of view, and then in providing glimpses into the complex lives of those living in this world.

[Kate Stericker · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic exploration of Deaf culture and the nuances of the contentious issues the community grapples with. Cohen writes with insight and sensitivity, and her prose made the students' stories as engrossing as any novel. I particularly appreciated the diverse perspectives she presented regarding the appropriate role for hearing people in predominantly Deaf spaces.