"An astonishingly revisionist biography of Alexander Graham Bell, telling the true--and troubling--story of the inventor of the telephone... Bell was an elocution teacher by profession. As the son of a deaf woman and, later, husband to another, his goal in life from adolescence was to teach the deaf to speak. Even his tinkering sprang from his teaching work; the telephone had its origins as a speech reading machine. And yet by the end of his life, despite his best efforts--or perhaps, more accurately, because of them--Bell had become the American Deaf community's most powerful enemy. The Invention of Miracles recounts an extraordinary piece of forgotten history. Weaving together a moving love story with a fascinating tale of innovation, it follows the complicated tragedy of a brilliant young man who set about stamping out what he saw as a dangerous language: Sign. The book offers a heartbreaking look at how heroes can become villains and how good intentions are, unfortunately, nowhere near enough--as well as a powerful account of the dawn of a civil rights movement and the triumphant tale of how the Deaf community reclaimed their once-forbidden language... "-- Provided by publisher.