A MAN WITHOUT WORDS by Susan...

A MAN WITHOUT WORDS by Susan Schaller (University of California Press: $10.95; 204 pp.). When Susan Schaller began a part-time job as signing interpreter in a school for the deaf, she met Ildefonso, a man in his late 20s who was unable to speak, read lips or sign. As he slowly grasped the rudiments of language, Ildefonso escaped from decades of isolation and learned to communicate. Exhilarated by her success as a teacher, Schaller discovered that humans raised without language are not rare phenomena, like the so-called “wild children,” but an all-too-common occurrence among the impoverished deaf. Her enthusiastic memoir calls attention to the needs of people denied this basic human attribute.