Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Linda Knapp's account of her bout with bacterial meningitis, including her total loss of hearing, is a powerfully emotional narrative. She focuses on her way back from near death to her role as wife and mother and her writing career, with the help of numerous professionals in the healthcare system and especially with cochlear implants, which gave her back her hearing. It is a remarkable story.
For me, however, what is even more remarkable is her ability to communicate it. She is a very capable writer whose earlier professional achievements included both novels and a weekly column in the Seattle Times on computer technologies. With these very different writing skills she has been able to integrate a cogent and well-documented description of the new technologies (including cochlear implants) which helped her recovery, into the chronological description of the personal experience as it affected herself and her family.
Recounting how, from her perspective, her family (including a teenage daughter) reacted to the ordeal and to her, she has taken a risk in sharing openly and honestly so many details of their personal interactions. But in so doing she has enriched the narrative and made it much more valuable to her readers.
Both the information on the modern medical technologies and her fascinating personal story will be extraordinarily helpful to anyone else who has suffered, as an adult, the tragedy of a killer disease and hearing loss.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Hearing Without Ears
This story covers the author's journey from the time she fell into a coma and woke up totally deaf, through her surgery to get an "electronic ear" (more correctly called a cochlear implant) and the ongoing effort to learn how to use it to hear again. There are many problems with substitute hearing, but they do fade--like background noise--to a place of lesser importance. Electronic hearing may not be perfect, but it's a whole lot better than no hearing at all.
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