KODA Korner

CODA International
Children of Deaf Adults is a non profit organization for adult hearing sons and daughters of deaf parents.	It is the mission of Double Pride to empower people in The Deaf Community and other diverse communities. We provide cross-cultural programs, products, and services to individuals, couples, families, organizations, and service providers to meet both their personal and professional development needs.

"Mother father deaf" is the phrase commonly used within the Deaf community to refer to hearing children of deaf parents. These children grow up between two cultures, the Hearing and the Deaf, forever balancing the worlds of sound and silence, as a sense of self and family forms. Paul Preston is one of these children, and in this book he takes us to the place where Deaf and Hearing cultures meet, where families like his own embody the conflicts and resolutions of two often opposing world views. Based on one hundred and fifty interviews with adult hearing children of deaf parents throughout the United States, Mother Father Deaf is rich in anecdote and analysis, remarkable for its insights into a family life normally closed to outsiders. Unlike others who have studied this community, focusing on pathology and family dysfunction, Preston lets a picture of hearing life among deaf parents emerge from the personal stories of those who have lived it. As they describe their family histories, their childhood memories, their sense of themselves as adults, and their life choices, these men and women chart the sometimes difficult middle ground between spoken and signed language, sameness and otherness, the stigmatizing and the stigmatized. Their stories challenge many of mainstream society's common myths and beliefs about hearing and deafness and illustrate the drama of belonging and being different as it unfolds within the self. In light of these personal narratives. Preston examines the process of assimilation and cultural affiliation among a population whose lives incorporate the paradox of being culturally "Deaf" yet functionally hearing. His book explores the culturally relative nature offamilies and the assumptions and expectations that all of us hold to be not only important but vital to our well-being as individuals and as a society.	Dad, Jackie, and Me From Booklist Gr. 2--4, younger for reading aloud. Following in the tradition of Bette Bao Lord's n the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson (1984), about a young Chinese immigrant to Brooklyn in 1947 who identifies with the travails of the rookie Dodger first baseman, Uhlberg tells another story of an outsider who feels a bond with Robinson. This outsider, though, is a real-life figure, the author's deaf father, who saw in the African American Robinson's stoic endurance of prejudice on and off the field a parallel to his own experience as a deaf man. It takes the young Uhlberg, narrator of the story, a while to overcome his embarrassment at his father's attempts to cheer for Robinson ("AH-GEE, AH-GEE," the deaf man yells from the Ebbetts Fields grandstand, attempting to say Jackie), but eventually Dad's devotion wins the day in a moving finale. Colin Bootman, who earned a Coretta Scott Honor Award for Almost to Freedom (2003), uses evocative watercolors rich in soft browns and lush greens to capture both the feel of the 1940s (fedora-wearing fans) and the electricity of Robinson's play. Bill Ott Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved