Song Without Words: Discovering My Deafness Halfway through Life

Were I to give a title to this my review of Gerald Shea's 2013 quasi-autobiography SONG WITHOUT WORDS: DISCOVERING MY DEAFNESS HALFWAY THROUGH LIFE, it would read "no one ... had any idea that I could not hear well." *** The lesson that I draw from SONG WITHOUT WORDS is that every school child in America should have thorough hearing tests at least twice before they are 16. ***Incredibly to me and other reviewers, author Gerald Shea was 33 when a pro forma physical exam for a new position with MOBIL oil found him hearing only five of twenty tones. Before that he had had only one thorough hearing examination: in first grade -- shortly before simultaneous attacks of small pox and scarlet fever destroyed most of the cochlear hairs sensitive to mid range and higher sounds. He later failed a draft board test to be drafted for Viet Nam -- but for heart problems, not for bad hearing. A doctor had waved Gerald on when the future author said "yes" to the seven-word question: "Do you hear what I am saying?" *** In one meeting years later with Saudi Arabian oil VIPS, to take one of hundreds of examples in SONG WITHOUT WORDS, the oil minister complimented lawyer Shea by saying "fast work." What Shea heard was "Aa eur." He then decoded this to "Aa = fast" and eur into erd into "work." "Fast work." Aids to decoding included lip reading, context and body language. *** Gerald Shea went through prep school, Yale University and Columbia Law School mishearing almost every sincle sentence directed at him. He did not hear words, he heard instead the weird babble that he called his "lyricals" and then had to turn them into normal English speech. When he took notes of lectures a heard via "lyricals," Shea would later spend hours in the evenings deciphering his notes and recasting them in standard English. Almost incredibly it was 25 years after he lost most of his hearing that he realized that he was largely deaf. He thought every speaker and listener did language the way he did. Only the others were very fast and he was very slow. *** Only twice in those 25 years did as many as two persons come close to seeing that his quirky conversational behaviors were rooted in terribly flawed hearing. Both were girl friends: one in high school, one in college. Other than those two no one, not even Shea himself, suspected possible hearing loss. *** I hope that this sketch of a book's unusually rich substantive content written lucidly and simply has given you enough of a sense of SONG WITHOUT WORDS for you to decide whether to read the book for yourself. -OOO-