Listening Ways of Hearing in a Silent World by Hannah Merker New foreword by Henry Kisor New author's notes

“It is Hannah Merker’s gift to see the sacred in the ordinary. . . . Spectacular!”— Abraham Verghese

Listening is Hannah Merker’s moving and evocative account of her passage into the world of deafness after a mid-life skiing accident. It is also her examination of the many ways people who cannot literally hear can “listen” and communicate. As Henry Kisor says in his foreword to this new edition, Merker “learned how to pay attention to the world both without and within her. Hers has been not so much a struggle to grasp the remnants of her hearing as it has been an intellectual adventure into the nature of sound.”

First published by Harper Collins in 1994.

HANNAH MERKER is or has been a librarian, teacher, writer, editor, bookstore owner, and political activist on behalf of the handicapped. A devoted sailor, she lives and works on a pink houseboat on Long Island Sound with her husband, her hearing dog, Smudge, and half a dozen cats. HENRY KISOR, the Books Editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, is the author of What’s That Pig Outdoors? A Memoir of Deafness and Flight of the Gin Fizz: Midlife at 4,500 Feet.

“Listening is a prolonged meditation on the importance of sound in the lives of the creatures of this planet.” —New York Times Book Review (front-page review)
“Like the work of Annie Dillard, whose prose Merker’s resembles, this journey through a disability quivers with ‘private passion’ and with an underlying cry of discovery—ringing evidence of an adventurous mind.,”—Kirkus Reviews

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Listening
ISBN 0-87074-448-8 paper $12.95

6x9. 224 pp.
Medical Humanities. Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Nature Studies.

Publication Date: November 1999.

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Terms of order and other ways to order