Who is Edith Ackers? All we know is that she is deaf, and her father, Benjamin, is one of Europe's most powerful champions of oralism, the belief that deaf people can be taught to speak. Oralism is sweeping through late 19th-century Europe, threatening to overturn the lives of deaf people, and making sign language redundant. David Archer, a young English journalist, is at first convinced that oralism will bring deaf people into the hearing world. But the passion of deaf people and their defence of sign language convinces him otherwise. At a public meeting in London, Benjamin Ackers, a wealthy...