Deaf in America Essay

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Deaf in America: Voices From A Culture
By Carol Padden & Tom L. Humphries
Copyright 1988

This book was mainly focused on looking at Deaf culture of today and comparing it to the culture of the past, and what kinds of struggles deaf people had to endure to get where they are today. The two authors of this book are deaf; one was deaf her whole life and the other became deaf as a child. In my opinion, that was a major contributing factor to why it was so interesting. The reader gets a chance to travel through the history of the Deaf through words from those who have experienced it. It also had a positive impact because the authors let the readers know in the introduction that they are deaf and a brief history of themselves, which I …show more content…
I think the book may be a bit different if it were written today, but not much. The majority of the book was about Deaf history, so not too much would have changed. Although, it would have been more updated in the sections about the technology being used and the different careers available, but since the book seemed to be more about Deaf culture and history, I don’t think it was really necessary for it to be included. I also don’t think that the book being so many years old made it any less interesting to read, at least for me. This book was both factual and opinionated, but I think the majority of it was more factual. Especially since most of the book discussed the history of Deaf culture, most of it would have had to be more facts than anything. Although, there were several places where there was clearly opinions that the authors shared with one another, and probably opinions that are shared throughout the Deaf community. It was interesting to read about Deaf history, especially since it was written and explained by people that are themselves deaf, and have experienced many things first hand. Overall, I enjoyed this book, and I am glad I read it. It gave me a lot of insight into Deaf history, and I think this will become very helpful in my American Sign Language classes. Recently, I have been considering taking up ASL as a minor, and this has
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