The Invention of Miracles

Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness

By: Katie Booth

Narrated by: Samantha Desz

Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins

Publisher's summary

Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
Finalist for the Mark Lynton History Prize

“Meticulously researched, crackling with insights, and rich in novelistic detail” (Steve Silberman), this “provocative, sensitive, beautifully written biography” (Sylvia Nasar) tells the true—and troubling—story of Alexander Graham Bell’s quest to end deafness.

“Researched and written through the Deaf perspective, this marvelously engaging history will have us rethinking the invention of the telephone.” —Jaipreet Virdi, PhD, author of Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History

We think of Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone, but that’s not how he saw his own career. As the son of a deaf woman and, later, husband to another, his goal in life from adolescence was to teach deaf students to speak. Even his tinkering sprang from his teaching work; the telephone had its origins as a speech reading machine.

The Invention of Miracles takes a “stirring” (The New York Times Book Review), “provocative” (The Boston Globe), “scrupulously researched” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) new look at an American icon, revealing the astonishing true genesis of the telephone and its connection to another, far more disturbing legacy of Bell’s: his efforts to suppress American Sign Language. Weaving together a dazzling tale of innovation with a moving love story, the book offers a heartbreaking account of how a champion can become an adversary and an enthralling depiction of the deaf community’s fight to reclaim a once-forbidden language.

Katie Booth has been researching this story for more than fifteen years, poring over Bell’s papers, Library of Congress archives, and the records of deaf schools around America. But she’s also lived with this story for her entire life. Witnessing the damaging impact of Bell’s legacy on her family would set her on a path that overturned everything she thought she knew about language, power, deafness, and the telephone.

©2021 Katie Booth. All rights reserved. (P)2021 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

Critic reviews

“As schoolchildren we learn that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. We don’t learn that this is among the least interesting things about him. It takes a book like Katie Booth’s The Invention of Miracles to teach us that. Provocative, personal, and exhaustively researched, Booth’s book is the rare biography that completely alters a famous person’s popular image.... Booth has the courage and perspective to portray her subject’s deeply flawed humanity, giving the book its poetry and tragic resonance.” (The Boston Globe)

“Meticulously researched, crackling with insights, and rich in novelistic detail, The Invention of Miracles is more than the revelatory biography of an inventor who transformed the world. By shining a bright light on society’s assumptions about disability, Booth’s book is a profound and lyrical meditation on what it means to be human.” (Steve Silberman, New York Times best-selling author of NeuroTribes)

"Katie Booth’s brave and absorbing book is the story of a contradictory genius whose inventiveness outstripped his compassion.... Booth’s style is highly poetic, even moving...[and] so scrupulously researched you feel like you’re walking alongside the inventor as he strides the Scottish moors or looking over his shoulder as he researches the qualities of different kinds of current in his Boston home.” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

New perspective

Great book and easy to listen to narration. It was clearly well researched and so informative. I imagine it will soon be a staple in deaf studies.

Lots of Research, but...

Much research here, but it is still a screed.
I wanted to know more about the man and his family.

Eye Opening

This book was a revelation for me. I knew that Alexander Graham Bell had invented the telephone and that he had had a deaf wife, but I knew nothing of Bell’s efforts to end deafness or the oralists. I have known a number of deaf people, am friends with several teachers of the deaf, and had a deaf great grandfather. I knew that many deaf people were under educated and misunderstood and that early access to language is critical for brain development but this book gave me insight into how truly important ASL is in the deaf community. I had no idea of the damage that was done in the misguided quest to “help” the deaf.

Outstanding book, a balanced view of the man

Outstanding book, audiobook, well-written, well-narrated, no slow points whatever. Bell was a "great" man in telefony, in the world of the deaf, in the theory & practice of early gliders & aircraft. Which does not mean that he was without blemishes. Booth does a great job balancing the good & the bad. Bell was for example, an enemy of ASL & a strong proponent of lip reading & intelligible speech, and Booth shows why he ended up on this side of the spectrum. Bell was also a leading light of the Progressive Movement, a movement that for all its good attributes (anti-trust, government regulation, slum clearance, immigration) also had its serious blemishes (most prominently, eugenics). Like other books about eugenics, Booth shows why progressives ended up at a crossroads where "making the world a better place" ended up including eugenics. Bell was by no means the only leader of Progressivism who ended up in the eugenics camp. I highly recommend this audiobook.

Weirdly inaccurate

Does not seem to be based on facts; rather, it seems to be personal opinions, projections and bizarre interpretations of history that are not backed up by sources.