Bell’s telephone travails are only part of the complex picture Ms. Booth paints in her ambitious, revisionist book ... so scrupulously researched you feel like you’re walking alongside the inventor as he strides the Scottish moors or looking over his shoulder as he researches the qualities of different kinds of current in his Boston home ... At times, Booth’s style is highly poetic, even moving. At others, it’s polemic, and appropriately infuriating ... Katie Booth’s brave and absorbing book is the story of a contradictory genius whose inventiveness outstripped his compassion.
Booth’s biography of Bell has been in the works for 15 years; her meticulous research and rigor are evident on every page. Engagingly written, the book enlivens a life that has often appeared dry in other accounts. Booth’s descriptions of Bell’s passionate courtship of his student Mabel Hubbard, who belonged to a much higher social class, are as stirring as a romance novel, and her narrative of his work on the telephone reads like a thriller. One comes away feeling deeply connected not only to Bell, but also to Mabel and a host of subsidiary characters ... Booth is doubly outraged: at what Bell wanted to do and at the psychic cost of the method by which he proposed to do it. Her book is a partisan rallying cry fueled in part by her experience of having two deaf grandparents ... Everything Booth says in this eloquent biography is backed up persuasively, but her yearning to correct the record should be balanced against the uncorrected record that has obtained previously. Though she attempts to wave the flag of impartiality, she is deeply invested in indicting her subject ... Bell’s wish that everyone understand everyone else came at a terrible price, but it was the product of its time. Booth’s anger reflects a current trend of holding people from the past to standards of the present.
Booth vigorously revises the historical record ... Booth reveals a rich history of heights and depths in The Invention of Miracles, including the questionable patent process that secured Bell’s name in history, the evolution and empowerment of the Deaf community, and Bell’s endearing marriage, which survived his own misguided intentions.
Booth paints a textured portrait of a man driven not by an entrepreneurial desire to invent a product that changed the world but by a passion to improve the lives of deaf people. Booth interweaves these two themes into a revealing biography that will enlighten readers ... Much of Booth’s biography carefully details Bell’s personal life and his marriage, she does not spare a careful assessment of his theories and politics ... Booth has exhaustively researched Bell’s long life in preparation for her biography and provides many invaluable insights and information. However, reflecting the aesthetics of contemporary narrative nonfiction, the author repeatedly takes certain liberties in attributing psychological motivations to Bell like sayings, 'It must have been dawning on him' and 'there must have been that dread.' This is but a small price to pay for an informative and revealing biography.
In this thoughtful biography, Booth...does not shy away from [Bell's] complicated legacy within the Deaf community ... The narrative of Booth’s book occasionally drifts into the minutia of research and patent law, yet the contrast between Bell’s inventions and his descent into eugenic thought is thoroughly gripping and unsettling ... A stunning biography that documents the Deaf people’s lengthy and ongoing efforts to have ASL acknowledged as a valid language. Booth’s writing stands apart and sheds insight on disability history in the 20th century.
... careful and balanced ... 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.
... respectful yet critical ... Booth skillfully recaps signal events of Bell’s youth in Edinburgh, his down-to-the-wire battle with Elisha Gray to patent the telephone, his marriage to his deaf student Mabel Hubbard and subsequent American citizenship, and his friendships with Helen Keller and others ... At a time when 'less than 8 percent of deaf children grow up with regular sign language access,' 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.
... impassioned and scrupulously researched ... 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.
