Listening

From Library Journal

Hearing loss caused by an accident 22 years ago prompted Merker, the executive editor of Academic Library Book Review , to think of sound, language, communication, and particularly listening in uncommon ways. Weaving together science and autobiographical experience, she contemplates topics ranging from sound waves to the possibility of conversations between plants. She provides insight into the world of the hearing impaired, relating frustrations, dangers, and the indignities of rude treatment. On the positive side, she writes lovingly of her guide dog and offers examples of alternative listening techniques. Merker’s writing is rambling, prone to reverie, and a bit difficult to follow. The result is not a typical self-help book but a collection of musings for people who want to become more creatively attuned to the world around them. For larger collections.
– Carol R. Nelson, Ball State Univ. Lib., Muncie, Ind.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly

Changing perceptions induced by her loss of hearing are fused in an ongoing adventure described by the author of these musings about life in a silent world. Merker, at one time a director of reading services for the handicapped, found herself among the disabled when a skiing accident some 20 years ago gradually deprived her of her hearing. A feisty woman, happily remarried, living close to nature on a houseboat on Long Island Sound in New York, Merker relies on her hearing guide dog to supplement her lip reading skill. She stresses that “it is possible for hearing impaired and deaf people to ‘hear,’ to acknowledge cues that indicate the presence of sound. It is possible for us to listen.” She defines this listening as visual, tactile and intuitive–which perhaps promotes her lyrical expression of this bounty in these pages.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

“I am an archeologist digging for sound, for its origins, its wondrous manifestations.” Deafened in a skiing accident two decades ago, Merker, in lyrical, intent appreciations, plumbs the relationships between self and sound, and the webs of communication within the world–seeking “new ways of listening for the hearing and the hearing impaired.” To the author, deaf and despairing, a friend offered an “experiment” of sharing in words a world of sound, until an awareness grew of events and things with sound: a struck match; the thunder that follows lightening. Oddly, then, “sounds become alive to me in ways they never were when I could hear them.” Merker explores the physics of sound and the uses made of ultrasonics and mechanical aids for the deaf from 19th-century funnels and cones to today’s experiments in bone conduction. Throughout, there are Merker’s own “readings” of vibrations, which she interprets with visual sightings. (Is a pump working? Bare feet on floorboards give the answer.) Merker delights in the seascape and fauna of Long Island Sound, where she lives with her husband in a houseboat. She observes birds, fish (there’s an amusing, head-shaking profile of two gloriously ugly, noisy fish), and insects–with their fascinating “ears.” Merker, who lip-reads, has been helped by her hearing aid and pays tribute also to two beloved dogs, one trained as a hearing guide dog. She turns outward through her disability toward “discovering the world anew,” and her militant insistence on the dignity of all “handicapped” people is a popular theme. Like the work of Annie Dillard, whose prose Merker’s resembles, this journey through a disability quivers with “private passion” and with an underlying cry of discovery–ringing evidence of an adventurous mind. Of interest both to hearing and non-hearing readers. — Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.