Why more Americans are going deaf than ever before—and what we can do about itFor twenty-two years, Katherine Bouton was a senior editor atThe New York Times. At daily editorial meetings, she had a secret that grew harder to keep every day—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 writes, she was “the kind of person who might have used an ear trumpet in the nineteenth century.” 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. Shouting Won’t Help is a deftly written, deeply felt look at a widespread and misunderstood phenomenon. In the vein 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, neurobiologists, and a variety of people afflicted with midlife hearing loss, braiding their stories with her own to illuminate the startling effects of the condition. The result is a surprisingly engaging account of what it’s like to live with an invisible disability—along with a robust prescription for our nation’s increasing problem with deafness.
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