An insightful, bighearted memoir that skillfully interrogates his own experience — and the experience of a multitude of others — of being deaf in today’s world. Both expansive and precise ... Lucidly braids all of this into an effortless, often lyrical account ... A transformative story for all readers, offering an opportunity to discover the missing sounds and misunderstandings of their own experience — and begin to comprehend what it means to truly listen.
The Quiet Ear lacks the intellectual rigor and finely wrought prose of Leland and Jones’s memoirs, as well as other works such as Jan Grue’s I Live a Life Like Yours and Emily Rapp Black’s Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg. But the tact and tenderness with which Antrobus writes about his wounded younger self and his deaf coming-of-age make the memoir a notable addition to the subgenre.
Compact, powerful ... What emerges most consistently from this moving book is his need to be met on his own terms, in a territory that he is given the freedom to map for himself.
