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A hearing specialist, Glorig established Walter Reed Army Hospital's Audiology and Speech Correction Center to help World War II personnel with hearing problems created by the war. He not only worked to design lighter and smaller hearing aids, he worked to reduce damage to ears in the first place by researching safe noise level standards. The standards were adopted by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for all U.S. employees, not just the military. Glorig died June 22 at age 92. From This is True for 28 June 1998 Suggestions for further reading:
 By: Robert Schwartz List Price: $16.95 Amazon Price: $11.53 Editorial Review: Courageous Souls explores the premise that we are all eternal souls who plan our lives, including our greatest challenges, before we re born for purposes of spiritual growth. The book contains ten true stories of people who planned physical illness, having handicapped children, deafness, blindness, drug addiction, alcoholism, losing a loved one, and severe accidents. Because very different life challenges are often planned for similar reasons, readers who have not faced these specific challenges will nevertheless see themselves - and their motivations as a soul - in these stories. As readers come to realize that they themselves planned their lives, suffering that once seemed purposeless becomes imbued with deep meaning. Wisdom may be acquired in a more conscious manner; feelings of anger, guilt, blame, and victimization are healed and replaced by acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude, and peace.  By: Josh Swiller List Price: $14.00 Amazon Price: $11.20 Editorial Review: A young man’s quest to reconcile his deafness in an unforgiving world leads to a remarkable sojourn in a remote African village that pulsates with beauty and violence These are hearing aids. They take the sounds of the world and amplify them.” Josh Swiller recited this speech to himself on the day he arrived in Mununga, a dusty village on the shores of Lake Mweru. Deaf since a young age, Swiller spent his formative years in frustrated limbo on the sidelines of the hearing world, encouraged by his family to use lipreading and the strident approximations of hearing aids to blend in. It didn’t work. So he decided to ditch the well-trodden path after college, setting out to find a place so far removed that his deafness would become irrelevant. That place turned out to be Zambia, where Swiller worked as a Peace Corps volunteer for two years. There he would encounter a world where violence, disease, and poverty were the mundane facts of life. But despite the culture shock, Swiller finally commanded attention—everyone always listened carefully to the white man, even if they didn’t always follow his instruction. Spending his days working in the health clinic with Augustine Jere, a chubby, world-weary chess aficionado and a steadfast friend, Swiller had finally found, he believed, a place where his deafness didn’t interfere, a place he could call home. Until, that is, a nightmarish incident blasted away his newfound convictions. At once a poignant account of friendship through adversity, a hilarious comedy of errors, and a gripping narrative of escalating violence, The Unheard is an unforgettable story from a noteworthy new talent.  By: Gina Nahai List Price: $25.00 Amazon Price: $16.50 Editorial Review: From the best-selling author of Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, a stirring, lyrical tale that offers American readers a unique insight into the inner workings of Iranian society. In the decade before the Islamic Revolution, Iran is a country at the brink of explosion. Twelve-year-old Yaas is born in Tehran, into an already divided family: Her father is the son of wealthy Iranian Jews who are integrated into the country s upper-class, mostly Muslim, elite; her mother was raised in the slums of South Tehran, one street away from the old Jewish ghetto. Yaas spends her childhood navigating the many layers of Iranian society. Her task, already difficult because of the disparity in her parents worldview, becomes all the more critical when her father falls in love with a beautiful woman from a noble Muslim family. As her parents marriage begins to crumble, and the country moves ever closer to revolution, Yaas is plagued by a mysterious, and terrifying, illness. And when she learns that her father is about to abandon her and her mother to immigrate to America with his mistress Yaas becomes determined to use her best effort to save herself and her family. At once a cultural exploration of an as-yet unfamiliar society, and a psychological study of the effects of loss, Caspian Rain takes the reader inside the tragic and fascinating world of a brave young girl struggling against impossible odds.  By: Susan C. Becker List Price: $15.95 Amazon Price: $14.06  By: Margalit Fox List Price: $27.00 Amazon Price: $17.82 Editorial Review: Imagine a village where everyone "speaks" sign language. Just such a village -- an isolated Bedouin community in Israel with an unusually high rate of deafness -- is at the heart of Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind. There, an indigenous sign language has sprung up, used by deaf and hearing villagers alike. It is a language no outsider has been able to decode, until now. A New York Times reporter trained as a linguist, Margalit Fox is the only Western journalist to have set foot in this remarkable village. In Talking Hands, she follows an international team of scientists that is unraveling this mysterious language. Because the sign language of the village has arisen completely on its own, outside the influence of any other language, it is a living demonstration of the "language instinct," man's inborn capacity to create language. If the researchers can decode this language, they will have helped isolate ingredients essential to all human language, signed and spoken. But as Talking Hands grippingly shows, their work in the village is also a race against time, because the unique language of the village may already be endangered. Talking Hands offers a fascinating introduction to the signed languages of the world -- languages as beautiful, vital and emphatically human as any other -- explaining why they are now furnishing cognitive scientists with long-sought keys to understanding how language works in the mind. Written in lyrical, accessible prose, Talking Hands will captivate anyone interested in language, the human mind and journeys to exotic places. |
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