Brief Notices

BRIEF NOTICES 1 Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World by Leah Hager Cohen. Boston , New York: Houghton Mifflin. xi & 297 pp. Cloth. ISBN 0-39563625 -6. Price $22.95. Train Go Sorry is too important a book to be reviewed adequately here. Although it is full of details that need little added to make a coherent picture of "a Deaf World," it also delights the general reader. With fully realized characters, both hearing and deaf, and fascinating stories, it merits the enthusiastic reviews it is receiving in non-scholarly journals. Its appeal to general readership , however, should not lead Anthropologists, students of sign language, educators, and psychologists to neglect it as a popular or light weight work. It will be and remain popular because of the quality of the writing and the depth and breadth of the writer's insight and knowledge, but just that insight and knowledge make it also a source of vital information for experts about a most elusive and underexplored territory, the area or arena where deaf and hearing persons interact. Just as chemical properties are discovered in the interaction of substances, so the properties-many of them unsuspected-of cultures are discovered when individuals from different cultures interact. On arena of interaction is the special school, once residential but now often serving day pupils only or serving pupils with various impairments. Leah Cohen knows one such school as no observer can who has not grown up from infancy within its walls, who is not the granddaughter of a former deaf pupil, who is not the daughter of one of its teachers, its principal, and now its superintendent. By accident of birth a participant, by temperament and training a meticulous observer, and by rare chance an outstanding writer, Leah Cohen has missed nothing of importance, from the backgrounds of many individuals presented fully drawn to issues dividing teachers, parents, children, interpreters, and educational administrators and theorists. What makes the book exceptional is that she has done it by focusing on these individuals and avoid- @1994 Linstok Press, Inc. Note inside front cover ISSN 0302-1475 Brief notice ing the methodologies of the (dare we say duller) social sciences. Nor are these the "representative" or composite characters used by some portrayers of a village or tribe. These are real people; in most instances introduced by their actual names. This fact and the unmistakable ring of authenticity throughout the book makes Cohen a writer to trust. In the times and places where deaf and hearing worlds interact there are divisions of opinion that almost lead to blows and certainly lead to fighting words; to name two, mainstreaming and cochlear implants. But in this book the author states fairly the positions and leaves it to the reader who has felt the whole impact of the stories in the book to take sides or to decide that compromise or accommodation must be reached. Not that the author is straddlling any fences. Whoever reads the book will know where she stands and, having brought an open mind, is likely to stand with her, for she is on the side of the angels; to name a few: James Taylor, Sophia Normantov, Janie Moran, and Oscar Cohen-not angels, of course, but genuine human beings who communicate across a barrier too many have called inpenetrable . All who find the notion of a Deaf culture or the definition of a Deaf community difficult to pin down (see Turner and comments above) should read Train Go Sorry to discover that there is as much variation among deaf people as among hearing people but that physical constraint on the mode of communication has as powerful an effect as gravitation or the "strong force" of the atom.. Those who must use vision to receive information ordinarily heard not only are attracted to one another, but they also construct and share a world different from the worlds of hearing people. This much has been known for some time. What Leah Cohen's book does, in addition to much else, is show how sympathetic but penetrating observation and genuine concern for individuals might lead to mutual acceptance-in the Lexington School, in the US, in the world. On a...