Nice, pre-pub review of Life After Deaf on goodreads.com

Ancient cochlear implant diagram, Wyoming. (Sorry, I see cochlear images everywhere these days.)

“Life After Deaf is a very frank tale of one man's quest to regain his ability to hear again. It's sprinkled with humor and easily readable, and it presents the common struggles of a deaf person in our incredibly inaccessible society (think along the lines of companies and departments that work solely with helping deaf people being only available through the phone and having no email to reach them through, or how sign language classes are actually geared towards people who CAN hear and are aimed at teaching translators, meanwhile being a struggle for someone actually deaf to participate in.) The author recalls the countless instances where his insurance company or doctors seemed to want to just get rid of him, pigeonholing his problem and not actually wanting to help, and he also talks about the lack of information needed to educate oneself about the opportunities or choices one has if they want to reclaim their ability to hear.

”It was a warmly written book and it was certainly interesting. More than that, it doesn't just deal with the doctor and insurance company drama - it was as much about coping with the change as it was about the technical aspects of it - about what one needs to do in order to not go nuts, having just lost one of their main senses, having their whole world changed all of a sudden, what with the way everyone you know seems suddenly unreachable to you, unable or even unwilling to communicate. The author wants to tell people who have newly become deaf that there are things they can do to cope emotionally and to learn to see that the rest of the world is still there, even though it seems to have faded in the aftermath of this personal tragedy.”

BTW, if you read books much at all, visit www.goodreads.com — it’s a fun, useful site.