About the Book Talking Hands is a book unlike any other. For the
first time, a book for a popular readership takes a look at the
mysterious and beautiful world of the signed languages of the
deaf--and explains what they reveal about how all language,
signed and spoken, works inside our heads. Written by a New York
Times journalist originally trained as a linguist, the book
combines the exciting popular science of Oliver Sacks and Steven
Pinker with the lyrical prose of Tracy Kidder and John McPhee.
The narrative of Talking Hands takes readers to a place like
nowhere else on earth: the village of Al-Sayyid (pronounced es-
SAYY-id), a remote Bedouin community in Israel where everyone
"speaks” sign language. There, as the result of an unusually
high incidence of hereditary deafness, an indigenous sign
language has sprung up entirely on its own, used by deaf and
hearing villagers alike. At every hour of the day, in nearly
every house in the village, in the fields and in the mosque,
there are people talking in sign