Why more Americans are going deaf than ever before?and what we can do about it For twenty-two years, Katherine Bouton was a senior editor at The New York Times. At daily editorial meetings, she had a secret that grew harder to keep every day?she couldn"t hear what her colleagues were saying. She had gone profoundly deaf in her left ear; her right was getting worse. As she writes, she was ?the kind of person who might have used an ear trumpet in the nineteenth century.?     Audiologists agree that we"re experiencing a national epidemic of hearing impairment. At present, 50 million Americans suffer some degree of hearing loss?17 percent of the population. And hearing loss is not exclusively a product of growing old. The usual onset is between the ages of nineteen and forty-four, and in many cases the cause is unknown.     Shouting Won"t Help is a deftly written, deeply felt look at a widespread and misunderstood phenomenon. In the vein of Jerome Groopman and Atul Gawande, and using her experience as a guide, Bouton examines the problem personally, psychologically, and physiologically. She speaks with doctors, audiologists, neurobiologists, and a variety of people afflicted with midlife hearing loss, braiding their stories with her own to illuminate the startling effects of the condition. The result is a surprisingly engaging account of what it"s like to live with an invisible disability?along with a robust prescription for our nation"s increasing problem with deafness.