June HLAA-TC Book Club
June 2026: Tuesday, June 23, 2026 5pm Western/7pm Central/ 8pm Eastern on Zoom: The Invention of Miracles: language, power and Alexander Graham Bell’s quest to end Deafness.” By Katie Booth. (BARD: DB 108369).
Register to receive the Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/Rkc5vJ5nTRmBlo7qW3rs5g
Synopsis: “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 book takes a 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. 2021.”
HLAA-TC Book Club meets in the evenings on Zoom (with computer/AI captions) and all book clubs are open to all. Book club meets every fourth Tuesday (unless announced otherwise). For more information about the book club, visit our webpage or please email Laura Hagemann (HLAA-TC Social Media Specialist) at social@hlaatc.org.
Zoom registration links are placed on our website a month before the corresponding book club meets.