SOURCE: Christiansen, John B. Review of Seeing Voices, by Oliver Sacks. Contemporary Sociology 19, no. 6 (November 1990): 894-95.

In the following review, Christiansen offers a mixed assessment of Seeing Voices.

Oliver Sacks begins his book [Seeing Voices] by issuing several disclaimers: he isn't deaf, he doesn't sign, he isn't an interpreter or a teacher, he knew little about deafness or deaf people before starting to write about them four years ago, he's not an expert on child development, nor is he a historian or a linguist. Nor, I might add, is he a sociologist. By and large, though, none of this matters a great deal as Sacks' book is a thoughtful and thought-provoking discussion of the “world of the deaf.”

The book is divided into three parts. Chapters 1 and 3 are revised versions of articles that previously appeared in The New York Review of Books, while chapter 2, the largest segment of...