Shouting Won't Help: Why I -- and 50 Million Other Americans -- Can't Hear You

<p>For twenty-two years, Katherine Bouton had a secret that grew harder to keep every day. An editor at <i>The New York Times</i>, at daily editorial meetings she couldn't hear what her colleagues were saying. She had gone profoundly deaf in her left ear; her right was getting worse. As she once put it, she was &quot;the kind of person who might have used an ear trumpet in the nineteenth century.&quot;</p><p>Audiologists agree that we're experiencing a national epidemic of hearing impairment. At present, 50 million Americans suffer some degree of hearing loss -- 17 percent of the population. And hearing loss is not exclusively a product of growing old. The usual onset is between the ages of nineteen and forty-four, and in many cases the cause is unknown.</p><p><i>Shouting Won</i>'<i>t Help </i>is a deftly written, deeply felt look at a widespread and misunderstood phenomenon. In the style of Jerome Groopman and Atul Gawande, and using her experience as a guide, Bouton examines the problem personally, psychologically, and physiologically. She speaks with doctors, audiologists, and neurobiologists, and with a variety of people afflicted with midlife hearing loss, braiding their stories with her own to illuminate the startling effects of the condition.</p><p>The result is a surprisingly engaging account of what it's like to live with an invisible disability -- and a robust prescription for our nation's increasing problem with deafness. <br>A <i>Kirkus Reviews </i>Best Nonfiction Book of 2013</p>