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Memoirs

THE INVENTION OF MIRACLES

Katie Booth

Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness

This astonishing revisionist biography of Alexander Graham Bell, tells the true - and troubling - story of the inventor of the telephone.

We think of Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone, but that's not how he saw his own career. Bell was an elocution teacher by profession. As the son of a deaf woman and, later, husband to another, his goal in life from adolescence was to teach the deaf to speak. Even his tinkering sprang from his teaching work; the telephone had its origins in a machine that would make visible the vibrations of speech. And yet by the end of his life, despite his best efforts - or perhaps, more accurately, because of them - Bell had become the American Deaf community's most powerful enemy. The Invention of Miracles recounts an extraordinary piece of forgotten history. Weaving together a moving love story with a fascinating tale of innovation, it follows the complicated tragedy of a brilliant young man who set about stamping out what he saw as a dangerous language: Sign. The book offers a heartbreaking look at how heroes can become villains and how good intentions are, unfortunately, nowhere near enough - as well as a powerful account of the dawn of a civil rights movement and the triumphant tale of how the Deaf community reclaimed their once-forbidden language. Katie Booth has been researching this story for over a decade, poring over Bell's papers, Library of Congress archives, and the records of deaf schools around America. But she's also lived with this story for her entire life. Witnessing the damaging impact of Bell's legacy on her family would set her on a path that upturned everything she thought she knew about language, power, deafness, and the telephone. Katie Booth's writing has appeared in The Believer, Aeon, Catapult, and Harper's Magazine, and has been highlighted on Longreads and Longform; "The Sign for This" was a notable essay in the 2016 edition of Best American Essays. Booth received a number of prestigious fellowships to support the research for The Invention of Miracles, including from the Library of Congress and the Massachusetts Historical Society. She was raised bilingually and biculturally in a mixed hearing/Deaf family.

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Book Published 2021-04-01 by Simon & Schuster

Comments

Fascinating. The Invention of Miracles tells the story of how Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone was intertwined with his sincere but misguided passion for teaching the deaf how to speak. It's a tale of great love, brilliant innovation, personal drama, and the unintended consequences of good intentions.

An urgent, provocative, and powerful book. I could never have imagined that eugenics and the telephone were so intimately related. The Invention of Miracles is a timely reminder of the flawed humanity that lies behind so much of our technological innovation.

Through The Invention of Miracles Katie Booth has introduced me to a whole new world, not just literally but conceptually. In her sympathetic but critical biography of Alexander Graham Bell, she explores the history of power and voice, she exposes the tyranny of the "normal", and she demonstrates the importance of listening not just speaking. A scholarly and lively biography revealing how a man who spent a life devoted to "liberating" deaf people ended up as one of their greatest enemies.

Meticulously researched, crackling with insights, and rich in novelistic detail, The Invention of Miracles is more than the revelatory biography of an inventor who transformed the world. By shining a bright light on society's assumptions about disability, Booth's book is a profound and lyrical meditation on what it means to be human.

UK / AUS: Scribe

... this ardent book is likely to reignite debates over what constitutes justice for the Deaf community. A well-written biography reveals less-familiar aspects of the life of the famed inventor.

... an impassioned and scrupulously researched account of inventor Alexander Graham Bell's fraught legacy within the deaf community... Booth uses moving anecdotes about her deaf grandparents and great-aunt to illustrate the psychologically corrosive effects of oralism, and notes the irony that Bell, who saw the education of the deaf as his most important work, came to believe that the world would be better with fewer deaf people in it. Enriched with vivid sketches of Bell's wife, Mabel Hubbard, and other historical figures, including Helen Keller, this revelatory history deserves a wide readership.

[a] careful and balanced history of Bell's work... Booth explores the progression of Bell's career with compassion and nuance, eliding neither his good intentions nor the lasting harm that his emphasis on orality wrought on generations of D/deaf students.

In The Invention of Miracles, Katie Booth revisits Bell's legacy, exploring his creative genius and his misguided efforts to eradicate Deaf culture. Read more...

A meticulously researched and beautifully told story about the power of language and culture and the costs of scientific single-mindedness.

A provocative, sensitive, beautifully written biography of an American genius.

Engagingly written, the book enlivens a life... as stirring as a romance novel... reads like a thriller. One comes away feeling deeply connected not only to Bell, but also to Mabel and a host of subsidiary characters. Read more...