Sound: A Memoir of Hearing Lost and Found

by Bella Bathurst

Overview

"Bathurst is a restless, curious writer… After reading this book, I found myself listening in a richer and more interested way." — Guardian

A profound, beautifully written exploration of sound by a young woman who lost her hearing, then regained it.

In this surprising and moving book, award-winning writer Bella Bathurst shares the extraordinary true story of how she lost her hearing and eventually regained it and what she learned from her twelve years of deafness. Diving into a wide-ranging exploration of silence and noise, she interviews psychologists, ear surgeons, and professors to uncover fascinating insights about the science of sound. But she also speaks with ordinary people who are deaf or have lost their hearing, including musicians, war veterans, and factory workers, to offer a perceptive, thought-provoking look at what sound means to us.

If sight gives us the world, then hearing—or our ability to listen—gives us our connections with other people. But, as this smart, funny, and profoundly honest examination reveals, our relationship with sound is both more personal and far more complex than we might expect.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771643825
Publisher:	Greystone Books
Publication date:	10/02/2018
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Bella Bathurst is a writer, photojournalist, and furniture maker. She has written four nonfiction books, including The Lighthouse Stevensons, which won the 1999 Somerset Maugham Award, and a novel, Special, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Observer, and many other outlets.

Table of Contents

1 Sailing 1

2 Hearing 25

3 Aid 37

4 Loss 48

5 Conduction 66

6 Rock 78

7 Acoustics 95

8 Silence 113

9 Distortion 122

10 Sign 145

11 Vision 161

12 Surfacing 174

13 Listening 190

14 Music 200

Further Reading 203

Acknowledgements 209

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"After reading this book, I found myself listening in a richer and more interested way."
— Guardian

"Bathurst’s affecting memoir will enlighten and educate."
— Publishers Weekly

"A memoir of hearing loss and what the author learned...through her unexpected recovery from it. A good writer knows material when it presents itself, and Bathurst is a very good writer."
— Kirkus Reviews

"A hymn to the faculty of hearing by someone who had it, lost it and then found it again, written with passion and intelligence … terrifying, absorbing and ultimately uplifting."
— Literary Review

"Less a memoir than an investigation of the importance of sound in human life … a moving and fascinating book."
— Financial Times

"Packed with detail about the physiology of hearing, the intricacies of acoustics and Bathurst's particular experience, Sound is a powerful argument for true listening"
— Shelf Awareness

"[Bathurst] explores all aspects of sound, a phenomenon so powerful and versatile it can lull us to sleep, send us in to transcendence, or drive us mad."
— Politics and Prose

Editorial Reviews

For The Lighthouse Stevensons

"Bathurst's elegantly written saga is bursting with life, laced with romantic dreams... Even readers with no special interest in the sea or Scotland will be swept up in Bathurst's narrative... Her exuberant family drama is an enchantment."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Stunning...It's hard to imagine many writers who could make civil engineering thrilling, but that's what Bathurst does."—San Francisco Chronicle

"Bathurst... [writes] with an enchanting eloquence."—New York Times Book Review"

For Special

"As 'special' as its title, this stunningly observed, wickedly funny, and ultimately tragic first novel is hightly recommended."—Library Journal (Starred)

"As fiction, utterly devastating, as psychology, grim and apocalyptic: a ripped-bare portrait of the evil that children can do."—Kirkus Reviews

"Dazzlingly written, blistering with feeling"—Boston Globe

From the Publisher

2018-07-16
A memoir of hearing loss and what the author learned about the subject in general through her unexpected recovery from it.A good writer knows material when it presents itself, and Bathurst (The Bicycle Book, 2011, etc.) is a very good writer. In 2004, when she found herself "not completely deaf, just down to about 30 percent of normal hearing," she recognized that she had a rich vein to mine—though perhaps not immediately, for she was pretty much in denial. Hearing loss was for the old and infirm, and she was neither. She resisted hearing aids, and she went about her journalistic work as if nothing were amiss. It was only later, when transcribing interviews, that she would recognize the gaps of incomprehension, realizing that she had failed to pick up on verbal cues her subjects had given her and that she had proceeded to ask questions that had nothing to do with the previous response. She experienced depression, and she learned how common it is to try to hide the condition. "If I had behaved like an island, then why the hell should it be a surprise when I became one?" she asks, referring to the way she held others at arm's length, accused of not really listening to them even when her hearing had been at full strength. "As it happened, it turned out to be a very overcrowded island. Though I didn't realize it at the time deafness is a very common problem, as is not talking about deafness." The author surveys the fields where hearing is most threatened, from music to the military, and why society as a whole often ignores it. Bathurst writes with a command of the way words sound: "And under it all the susurration of the sea itself," she writes of a sailing expedition imperiled by her limited hearing. "The shush it makes as it slides along the hull, fast or slow, urgent or gentle, its mesmerizing endlessness."An illuminating memoir of hearing lost and found.

Kirkus Reviews