Focusing on Deaf culture and sign language, the book dismantles the idea that language is naturally spoken, showing instead how meaning, identity, and cognition are shaped by modality rather than deficiency.

Sacks moves between neurology, linguistics, history, and lived experience to argue that sign languages are not substitutes for speech but fully realised linguistic systems — with their own grammars, poetics, and capacities for abstraction. It is a long overdue, and still deeply under-acknowledged record of culture, community, and the damage caused when communication is treated as a problem to be fixed.

A careful witnessing, and Sacks is just that, this careful, beautifully spoken being. It's still quietly radical, and I think his works always will be, despite often being misrepresented as "pop" science or philosophy. They're simply, not.