The Invention of Miracles
Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness
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Narrated by:
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Samantha Desz
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By:
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Katie Booth
About this listen
Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
Finalist for the Mark Lynton History Prize
“Meticulously researched, crackling with insights, and rich in novelistic detail” (Steve Silberman), this “provocative, sensitive, beautifully written biography” (Sylvia Nasar) tells the true—and troubling—story of Alexander Graham Bell’s quest to end deafness.
“Researched and written through the Deaf perspective, this marvelously engaging history will have us rethinking the invention of the telephone.” —Jaipreet Virdi, PhD, author of Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History
We think of Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone, but that’s not how he saw his own career. As the son of a deaf woman and, later, husband to another, his goal in life from adolescence was to teach deaf students to speak. Even his tinkering sprang from his teaching work; the telephone had its origins as a speech reading machine.
The Invention of Miracles takes a “stirring” (The New York Times Book Review), “provocative” (The Boston Globe), “scrupulously researched” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) new look at an American icon, revealing the astonishing true genesis of the telephone and its connection to another, far more disturbing legacy of Bell’s: his efforts to suppress American Sign Language. Weaving together a dazzling tale of innovation with a moving love story, the book offers a heartbreaking account of how a champion can become an adversary and an enthralling depiction of the deaf community’s fight to reclaim a once-forbidden language.
Katie Booth has been researching this story for more than fifteen years, 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 overturned everything she thought she knew about language, power, deafness, and the telephone.
©2021 Katie Booth. All rights reserved. (P)2021 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“As schoolchildren we learn that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. We don’t learn that this is among the least interesting things about him. It takes a book like Katie Booth’s The Invention of Miracles to teach us that. Provocative, personal, and exhaustively researched, Booth’s book is the rare biography that completely alters a famous person’s popular image.... Booth has the courage and perspective to portray her subject’s deeply flawed humanity, giving the book its poetry and tragic resonance.” (The Boston Globe)
“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.” (Steve Silberman, New York Times best-selling author of NeuroTribes)
"Katie Booth’s brave and absorbing book is the story of a contradictory genius whose inventiveness outstripped his compassion.... Booth’s style is highly poetic, even moving...[and] 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.” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
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- Narrated by: Kate Moore
- Length: 14 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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1860: As the clash between the states rolls slowly to a boil, Elizabeth Packard, housewife and mother of six, is facing her own battle. The enemy sits across the table and sleeps in the next room. Her husband of 21 years is plotting against her because he feels increasingly threatened - by Elizabeth’s intellect, independence, and unwillingness to stifle her own thoughts. So Theophilus makes a plan to put his wife back in her place. One summer morning, he has her committed to an insane asylum.
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Everyone should read this!
- By Lana S on 12-22-21
By: Kate Moore
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A Warrior of the People
- How Susan La Flesche Overcame Racial and Gender Inequality to Become America’s First Indian Doctor
- By: Joe Starita
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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On March 14, 1889, Susan La Flesche received her medical degree - becoming the first Native American doctor in US history. She earned her degree 31 years before women could vote and 35 years before Indians could become citizens in their own country. This is the story of an Indian woman who effectively became the chief of an entrenched patriarchal tribe, the story of a woman who crashed through thick walls of ethnic, racial, and gender prejudice and then spent the rest of her life using a unique bicultural identity to improve the lot of her people.
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A Remarkable Woman
- By Jean on 11-27-16
By: Joe Starita
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Tales of Wonder
- By: Huston Smith
- Narrated by: Michael McConnohie
- Length: 5 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Huston Smith, the man who brought the world's religions to the West, was born almost a century ago to missionary parents in China during the perilous rise of the Communist Party. Smith's lifelong spiritual journey brought him face-to-face with many of the people who shaped the 20th century. His extraordinary travels around the globe have taken him to the world's holiest places, where he has practiced religion with many of the great spiritual leaders of our time.
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Takes of wonder for sure, by a wonderful man.
- By Dr. D. Brian Austin on 04-03-19
By: Huston Smith
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A Suitable Boy (Dramatised)
- By: Vikram Seth
- Narrated by: Ayesha Dharker, Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal, full cast
- Length: 5 hrs and 44 mins
- Original Recording
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A Suitable Boy is Vikram Seth's epic love story set in India. Funny and tragic, with engaging, brilliantly observed characters, it is as close as you can get to Dickens for the twentieth century. The story unfolds through four middle class families: the Mehras, Kappoors, Khans, and Chatterjis. Lata Mehra, a university student, is under pressure from her mother to get married. But not to just anyone she happens to fall in love with.
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would prefer unabridged naration
- By Tamshine on 07-07-11
By: Vikram Seth
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The Yellow Wallpaper
- By: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- Narrated by: Jo Myddleton
- Length: 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Instructed to abandon her intellectual life and avoid stimulating company, she sinks into a still-deeper depression invisible to her husband, who believes he knows what is best for her. Alone in the yellow-wallpapered nursery of a rented house, she descends into madness.
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A Visceral Reaction
- By Em on 05-02-12
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Fully Alive
- Discovering What Matters Most
- By: Timothy Shriver
- Narrated by: David Drummond
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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At a time when we are all more rudderless than ever, we look for the very best teachers and mentors to guide us. In Fully Alive, an unusual and gripping memoir, Timothy Shriver shows how his teachers have been the world's most forgotten minority: people with intellectual disabilities. In these pages we meet the individuals who helped him come of age and find a deeper and more meaningful way to see the world.
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Eye opening book
- By Robert J. Herman on 06-05-15
By: Timothy Shriver
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The Sum of Our Days
- By: Isabel Allende
- Narrated by: Blair Brown, Isabel Allende
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of the tragic death of her daughter, Paula. Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom, this remarkable memoir is as exuberant and as full of life as its creator. Allende bares her soul while sharing her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory - and recounts stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her and lovingly embraces as a new kind of family.
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She does not disappoint
- By ChiChi's Rule on 06-01-22
By: Isabel Allende
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There is a River
- The Story of Edgar Cayce
- By: Thomas Sugrue
- Narrated by: Mitch Horowitz
- Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) is known to millions today as the grandfather of the new age. A medical clairvoyant, psychic, and Christian mystic, Cayce provided medical, psychological, and spiritual advice to thousands of people who swore by the effectiveness of his trance-based readings.
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Insightful
- By Reg on 08-08-18
By: Thomas Sugrue
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Becoming Elisabeth Elliot
- By: Ellen Vaughn
- Narrated by: Connie Shabshab
- Length: 12 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Elisabeth Elliot was a young missionary in Ecuador when members of a violent Amazonian tribe savagely speared her husband, Jim, and his four colleagues. Incredibly, prayerfully, Elisabeth took her toddler daughter, snakebite kit, Bible, and journal...and lived in the jungle with the stone-age people who killed her husband. In this authorized biography, Ellen Vaughn uses Elisabeth’s private, unpublished journals, and candid interviews with her family and friends, to paint the adventures and misadventures God used to shape one of the most influential women in modern church history.
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Great book!
- By Dove on 09-27-20
By: Ellen Vaughn
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Speak
- A Novel
- By: Louisa Hall
- Narrated by: Suzan Crowley, Christopher Ashman, Adrienne Rusk, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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In a narrative that spans geography and time, from the Atlantic Ocean in the 17th century to a correctional institute in Texas in the near future, and told from the perspectives of five very different characters, Speak considers what it means to be human and what it means to be less than fully alive.
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Like nothing else
- By Anonymous User on 06-22-17
By: Louisa Hall
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The House of Government
- A Saga of the Russian Revolution
- By: Yuri Slezkine, Claire Bloom - director
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 45 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction. The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment.
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Inside saga of the leaders of Bolshevism & the USSR
- By Edward V. Blanchard on 11-05-17
By: Yuri Slezkine, and others
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More Die of Heartbreak
- By: Saul Bellow
- Narrated by: Ramiz Monsef
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Kenneth Trachtenberg, an eccentric and witty native of Paris, travels to the Midwest to spend time with his famous American uncle, a world-renowned botanist and self-described "plant visionary". After numerous affairs and failed relationships, the restless Uncle Benn seeks a settled existence in the form of marriage - but tying the knot again opens the door to a host of new torments.
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A great book
- By John A. on 03-16-22
By: Saul Bellow
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The Prophet
- By: Khalil Gibrán
- Narrated by: Peter Batchelor
- Length: 1 hr and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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World-famous 26 prose poetry fables written in English by the Lebanese-American poet and writer. It was originally published in 1923. It is Gibran's best known work. The Prophet has been translated into over 100 different languages, making it one of the most translated books in history.
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Literally the best book!
- By Amazon Customer on 04-25-20
By: Khalil Gibrán
What listeners say about The Invention of Miracles
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Tom B
- 05-06-21
New perspective
Great book and easy to listen to narration. It was clearly well researched and so informative. I imagine it will soon be a staple in deaf studies.
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- Clair Karma
- 05-16-21
Lots of Research, but...
Much research here, but it is still a screed.
I wanted to know more about the man and his family.
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- Rosemary P.
- 01-30-23
Eye Opening
This book was a revelation for me. I knew that Alexander Graham Bell had invented the telephone and that he had had a deaf wife, but I knew nothing of Bell’s efforts to end deafness or the oralists. I have known a number of deaf people, am friends with several teachers of the deaf, and had a deaf great grandfather. I knew that many deaf people were under educated and misunderstood and that early access to language is critical for brain development but this book gave me insight into how truly important ASL is in the deaf community. I had no idea of the damage that was done in the misguided quest to “help” the deaf.
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- D. Littman
- 04-10-21
Outstanding book, a balanced view of the man
Outstanding book, audiobook, well-written, well-narrated, no slow points whatever. Bell was a "great" man in telefony, in the world of the deaf, in the theory & practice of early gliders & aircraft. Which does not mean that he was without blemishes. Booth does a great job balancing the good & the bad. Bell was for example, an enemy of ASL & a strong proponent of lip reading & intelligible speech, and Booth shows why he ended up on this side of the spectrum. Bell was also a leading light of the Progressive Movement, a movement that for all its good attributes (anti-trust, government regulation, slum clearance, immigration) also had its serious blemishes (most prominently, eugenics). Like other books about eugenics, Booth shows why progressives ended up at a crossroads where "making the world a better place" ended up including eugenics. Bell was by no means the only leader of Progressivism who ended up in the eugenics camp. I highly recommend this audiobook.
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- Happy shopper
- 04-18-21
Weirdly inaccurate
Does not seem to be based on facts; rather, it seems to be personal opinions, projections and bizarre interpretations of history that are not backed up by sources.
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1 person found this helpful