prominent animal behavior scientist, writes: "The best book on a normal language-less person is A Man Without Words by Susan Schaller. Susan Schaller has spent twenty years travelling and researching language-less people completely on her own. The experts she tried to get help from when she first started out were dismissive, uncooperative, or hostile." One reviewer noted that the author said that when Ildefonso meets a Deaf person, they exchange more information in a brief conversation with him than she had been able to exchange in weeks. The reviewer concluded that Ildefonso may not have been as "languageless" as Schaller believed. Adaptations A short documentary film about Ildefonso and Schaller, with the same title as the book, was produced in 2013 by filmmaker Zack Godshall, whose previous work includes the 2011 Sundance film Lord Byron. This film was shown at the Southern Screen film festival in Lafayette, Louisiana. An adaptation of the book for the stage was written by Derek Davidson and premiered by An Appalachian Summer Festival in Boone, NC, in July 2015. References See also Deaf Culture Genie (feral child) Helen Keller Language Acquisition Language Linguistics Cognitive Linguistics American non-fiction books 1991 non-fiction books Deaf culture in the United States