Not quite what I was expecting, but I still learned a lot. I wanted to fill in gaps of my knowledge of ASL (and sign languages in general), so this seemed like a good start. I was expecting it to be an in-depth study of ASL, but it's really an intro to linguistics textbook that just happens to use ASL (and English) for the examples. I ended up skimming a lot of the content for this reason and just focusing on the examples.
Unusually, about half of this book is a standard textbook and the other half is a series of supplemental readings. There's also a very useful DVD with video examples. As someone already well-informed in linguistics, the supplemental readings were more interesting to me than the textbook itself.
Extremely well written and easy to understand. The author certainly understood the topic and I look forward to reading more in the series. Many thanks from a Deaf/blind Gubbi Gubbi lass living in Finland.
This is an excellent resource for any ling people interested in manual language. It serves partly as an introduction and partly as an anthology of relevant papers on a wide variety of linguistic subfields relating to ASL