Books published in November

Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson
by Susan Burch & Hannah Joyner
Hardcover: 312 pages
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press (November 5, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0807831557

Junius Wilson (1908-2001) spent 76 years at a state mental hospital in Goldsboro, North Carolina, including 6 in the criminal ward. He had never been declared insane by a medical professional or found guilty of any criminal charge. But he was deaf and black in the Jim Crow South. Unspeakable is the story of his life. In addition to offering a bottom-up history of life in a segregated mental institution, Burch and Joyner's biography also enriches the traditional interpretation of Jim Crow by highlighting the complicated intersections of race and disability as well as of community and language.

Leading Ladies by Marlee Matlin & Doug Cooney
Reading level: Ages 9-12
Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing (November 6, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0689869878

(first mentioned July 5, 2007)

Hoggee by Anna Myers

Reading level: Young Adult
Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: Walker Books for Young Readers; Reprint edition (November 13, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0802796834

Howard Gardner is starving to death. All spring and summer, Howard and his older, more charming brother Jack worked as hoggees, driving the mules that pulled boats along the Erie Canal. In a misguided attempt to outshine his brother, Howard chooses to stay behind in Birchport for the winter to save his traveling money and send it home to his family. After his winter job falls through, Howard fears that he might not survive the winter. As desperate as Howard is, he is haunted by the sadness he sees in the eyes of Sarah (the Deaf character), the granddaughter of the man who keeps the mules. Even though she’s older than her two sisters, she never speaks, and she seems completely disconnected from the world.

The Spanish National Deaf School: Portraits from the Nineteenth Century by Susan Plann

Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Gallaudet University Press; First edition edition (November 15, 2007)
ISBN-10: 1563683555

In nineteenth-century Spain, the education of deaf students took shape through various contradictory philosophies and practices. Susan Plann depicts this ambivalence by profiling a select group of teachers and students in her detailed history The Spanish National Deaf School: Portraits from the Nineteenth Century.Plann’s subjects reveal the political, financial, and identity issues that dominated the operation of the National School for Deaf-Mutes and the Blind in Madrid from 1805 to1899. Roberto Francisco Prádez y Gautier, the first deaf teacher in Spain, taught art from 1805–36; he also was the last deaf teacher for the next 50 years. Juan Manuel Ballesteros, the hearing director from 1835 to1868, enacted an “ableist” policy that barred deaf professors. At the same time, another hearing teacher, Francisco Fernández Villabrille, wrote the first Spanish Sign Language dictionary. In the 1870s, two deaf students, Manuel Tinoco and Patricio García, resisted the physical abuse they received and set the stage for the growth of a Deaf identity that opposed the deprecating medical model of deafness. Marcelina Ruiz Ricote y Fernández a hearing female teacher who taught from 1869 to 1897, combated the school’s sexist polices. The Spanish National Deaf School concludes with Martín de Martín y Ruiz, the most famous deaf-blind student from the Madrid school. Through these portraits, Plann has brought life to the major issues that defined education in nineteenth-century Spain, themes that have influenced the status of deaf Spaniards today.

Nobody's Perfect by Marlee Matlin & Doug Cooney

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
Paperback Reprint Pub. Date: November 2007
ISBN-13: 9781416949763

(first mentioned on April 29, 2007. See Review)