Books about Deaf culture are often very defensive in tone. To hearing people, Deaf people are “disabled”, “disadvantaged”, missing an integral part of a hearing person’s life. To Deaf people, they’re just people–people who have their own distinct language and culture. And both the language and the culture have been downplayed, belittled, and criticized, for as long as they’ve been around.

This would be a great place to start for anyone who hasn’t read a bunch of books on Deaf culture; you’ll get to find out a number of things that might surprise you about the Deaf community. But for someone who’s read several books on Deaf culture already, it seems like it doesn’t have a lot of depth to it, it’s preaching to the choir, and it leaves out a lot of really interesting details. It seems like it was written for hearing people, as a way of getting a Deaf foot in the door, so to speak. I’d only recommend it to people who need to get started reading about Deaf culture.