An intriguing history of the education of the deaf starting with ancient times to the middle ages. In the early 1800s, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet went to Europe and one year later returned with Laurent Clerc, a deaf priest and teacher of the deaf. Together they began the American School for the Deaf. Alexander Graham Bell who was a strong advocate of oralism while Gallaudet endorsed using American Sign Language. These two famous people started a raging war that continues today. There is extensive coverage about the "Deaf President Now" revolt that occurred in 1988 when a hearing president was selected for Gallaudet University (the only university for the deaf). The students successfully demanded that their school have a deaf president. An excellent book about the history of how the deaf have been repressed and slowly becoming liberated. As the mother of a deaf daughter, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.

Hand, Heart, and Mind is an awesome book! It really touched me because I know 3 deaf people. I never knew the hardships that those people went through. I thuroughly enjoyed this book!

Lou Ann Walker is a fine writer, so this book goes by easily; her descriptions are intense, and the reader is sucked into the story.

I still have a problem with it. The book has a little cloud over it. The child Walker worries incessantly that people will think her parents are quaint or not worthy for their deafness or in other ways as well, because they're not socially aware and sophisticated. There seems always to be an unspoken feeling of loss.

Walker's family is deeply loving, but she grew up feeling a burden of the type that lower East side of Jewish grandmothers inflict. She was the oldest, she was her parents' interpreter. She was their conduit to the world outside their home; she was privy to things a child doesn't usually know about her family. She went to doctors' appointments with her mother, and introduced the family to new neighbors. But she bore up under this onus, smiling, never letting on that it bothered her. Until now. Or so she seems to suggest in the book.

I can't say how I would act under the same weight, however, Walker's mother says once that her oldest daughter "takes things too hard." Walker seems by nature to be subdued, and just a little dour; at times she casts too much of her own personality into what she passes off as the general experience of children of Deaf parents. My experience of the Deaf community is that Deaf people are fun, energetic, full of humor and adventure. My view is my view. This just needs to be kept in mind; this book is one woman's biography, and not an unbiased sociological study of Deafness and family life.

What also isn't made clear is that times have changed. Walker was in college in 1973. Her parents were in the State Schools for the Deaf in the THIRTIES. Back then, students were not permitted to sign; they were expected to speak and lip-read only. Rarely taken off the school grounds for outings, Deaf children went home only for Christmas and the summer. Otherwise, they were at school, signing to one another whenever they were sure they were not being watched.

The Deaf parents now raising children watched Marlee Matlin win an Academy Award when they were in high school. When they were in college, at Gallaudet University, they took to the streets in an explosive protest to eject their school's president, and have a new, Deaf president appointed.

The book is a beautiful autobiography, and does capture some important moments in Deaf history. Read the book for its language, for its eloquent and unabashed descriptive passages. Read it for history. But don't expect to learn about the Deaf Community as it is today.

This book details the life story of hearing child raised by deaf parents. It gives a remarkable account of the special challenges faced by deaf people in a hearing world, and of the petty bigotries that they face every day. It also answers many questions- -how can deaf parents deal with a hearing child? What is it like for a hearing child to grow up in a deaf family? Walker found her life greatly affected by her parents' deafness. As soon as she could talk, she found herself translating for her parents, helping them fill out forms, and correcting their written English. Nevertheless, I couldn't help feeling that some of the discomfort that she attributes to her parents' deafness may have more to do with her own personality and general upbringing. For example, the story of her leaving the Midwest to go off to Harvard is repeated over again every year, not only by children of deaf parents, but also children of farmers, factory workers, and drug dealers. No matter who their parents are, it takes quite a bit of adjustment to learn to survive in Cambridge. How different would Walker's life had been if she had known other children like herself in her extended family or neighborhood? Perhaps she might not have felt so isolated, so strange. No family situation is perfect- -each family has its own unique features. This is the story of what works for one family.

I thought this book was an excellent book. It touched me in so many ways, i can't describe it. I told my mother about this story, and she cried. It had such an impact on my family. I too have deaf parents, and the what's so weird, is that my life is very, very similar to Lou Ann's. It's a real page turner, and i think anyone interested in deafness, or the hearing child's perspective should read this book. This book is a book that is worth sharing and reading over and over again... I guarantee it!