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Title: Helen Keller: A Life by Dorothy Herrmann ISBN: 0-226-32763-9 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.46 (28 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Very insightful...with a couple of minor caveats or nitpicks
Comment: Briefly, I give the book a fairly high rating, because it offered much more detailed and new information than ever provided before in anything else I had read about Helen Keller.
It is very well-researched and almost uniformly highly readable (very little dry stuff). It gives a harrowing account of Annie Sullivan's nightmarish childhood (and difficult and demanding personality throughout her adulthood) than was every really hinted at in other works, or in "The Miracle Worker"). That gives even more insight on how these two people interacted for so many years together.
It also gives much information on Helen's sometimes naive and leftist/pacifist/near anarchist political philsophies (strongly developed by conversion to Swedenborgian).
It also gives an insightful analysis of what Helen's family relationship was really like. If you've ever been on the house tour in Tuscumbia, AL, this stuff is sugar-coated and glossed over. While on some levels one can understand why, one is really mislead about what her life there was really like. Not to mention the true nature of her family. Captain Keller is just not the Civil War hero he had been made out to be, and her mother was very difficult throughout her life.
And had she not suffered from scarlet fever and its aftermath, Helen would have been a Southern Belle through and through. She was very beautiful (despite the eye deformities), and her life would have been such that she would have been expected to marry well and live as much of a life of leisure as possible.
I had no idea that Ms. Keller was essentially an invalid (and virtually suffered from dementia) for at least the last 6 years of her life. Not much information is provided about the end of her life. Not to be morbid or focus on the potentially lurid, I was left wondering what her caretakers had to do and what their experiences were, as well as Miss Keller's.
All things said, this is a really essential book if you are interested in a fascinating life of an extraordinary woman.
I look forward to the new Laura Bridgman book that just came out (6/01). She figures in the book fairly prominently. Annie Sullivan had a reasonably close relationship with her (although Miss Bridgman was much older--born in 1829--and died at the age of 59).
Rating: 4
Summary: Good, traditional narrative work on Helen Keller
Comment: This book was very enjoyable, providing an excellent focus on Helen's adult life, and on the people around her throughout her life. Dorothy Herrman is a good, if not spectacularly readable writer. The book's weakness is that it fails to place Helen in her times sufficiently ... giving only hints as to what was happening to blind education, charity politics & other "social" issues in which she lived. There are probably other books that cover that ground. In contrast to some of the other reviewers, I found the book insufficiently analytical, not overly analytical. And I did not find anything in it that was overly speculative either. Indeed, the author is always at pains to indicate when she is "speculating," rather than hiding such things in commentary.
Rating: 4
Summary: Fascinating, but too disturbing
Comment: The Helen Keller most of us are familiar with is the beligerent and frustrated little girl who in that fateful Spring of 1887, became docile, loving, and all of a sudden able to understand things when she put her hand under the water pump. But little was always written about her adult life. I always thought she had perfect features for a woman who was 100% blind and deaf. I recall Annie Sullivan's description of Helen when she first met her was that she was "noticeably blind with one protruding eye" and I thought her eyes looked perfect and beautiful, if not unfocused, for a blind woman, but then again I looked at photographs of her from her twenties on down and they were always right profile pics, with the exception of her photo on the front cover revealing her protruding left eye. It gives me the heebeejeebees that she had them removed and replaced with prosthetics. Anyway, they should make a movie about this detailing her life from Radcliffe college to her death.
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Title: Story of My Life by Helen Keller ISBN: 0553213873 Publisher: Bantam Books Pub. Date: 01 July, 1991 List Price(USD): $4.95 |
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Title: Light in My Darkness by Helen Keller, Ray Silverman, Dorothy Herrmann ISBN: 0877853983 Publisher: Chrysalis Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Helen and Teacher: The Story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy by Joseph P. Lash ISBN: 0201694689 Publisher: Addison Wesley Publishing Company Pub. Date: 01 April, 1997 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title:The Miracle Worker ASIN: B000056HEB Publisher: MGM/UA Video Pub. Date: 06 March, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.95 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $12.26 |
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Title: To Love This Life: Quotations From Helen Keller by Helen Keller ISBN: 0439319137 Publisher: Scholastic Paperbacks Pub. Date: August, 2002 List Price(USD): $4.50 |
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