About
For the last six years John Moore has been writing Silent Pigeons Coo. One man's story of overcoming progressive sensory loss. This is Moore's third book.
During the last six years John Moore has been writing Silent Pigeons Coo. One man’s story of overcoming progressive sensory loss. This is Moore’s third book.
Silent Pigeons Coo is a mixed genre story. It includes memoir, history and a sprinkling of humorous fiction to describe incidents and conversations swallowed up in time. The main thread is about overcoming. It explores setbacks that affect most people due to choices made by previous generations, the hindrance of self-sufficiency, agonies of divorce and bereavement, the complications of nursing an inconvenient secret and the joys of overcoming a challenge.
The memoir also reveals how the protagonist was caught up in an increasingly dualistic debate about sign and oral communication during the 1960s. Anthony Lawton is blind and profoundly deaf but even at 76 his lean stature remains unbowed beneath his thinning grey hair. He cannot watch television and so in the evening he writes, listens to audio books or plays competitive chess online. How does someone with dual sensory loss do all this? During four years of interviews I have sought to reveal something of Anthony’s struggle to live in mainstream society. Dr Daniel Ling OC, Anthony’s teacher of the deaf said: “People who overcome a problem can have an abundance many people are deprived of. In fact more so because they have overcome a problem”.
‘. . . beautiful book . . . wonderful insights . . .’
Tom Woodman. Senior Lecturer (Rtd.) Department of English. University of Reading