Helen Keller: A Life Paperback – December 15, 1999

At age 66, I have read hundreds of excellent books, including numerous biographies. Nothing I have ever read has come close to Ms. Herrmann's meticulously researched and fascinating account of this extraordinary woman and her equally extraordinary teacher. Like many, I have never stopped to think of how difficult life must be for the blind, let alone the deaf-blind. Ms. Herrmann's book has given me a renewed purpose in life – to donate as much as I can to Helen Keller-related charities. Highly recommended.

Excellent, beautiful book. An objective look at the TRUE life of Helen Keller. Moving and emotional and stunning. This book is not just another biography, but a tale of dependence, desire and growth.

Product was damaged the book was not in the binding and it is not refundable I may not return a bowl not refundable but not return Obel

Arrived promptly in great shape. Extremely interesting story of an extraordinary woman. Makes fascinating reading. Good overview of her unequaled life.

This is another book that I have in my library. It is such a tender and touching bio about Helen Keller--who just happens to be another GREAT Alabamian!

Great product. Fast delivery. Perfect!

good read

My grandfather saw Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan on one of their vaudeville tours in the early 1920s in St. Louis, and never forgot the experience. Helen never achieved her lifelong goal of speaking in a way that was pleasing or comprehensible to the average person, but onstage she would recite a few lines of something with which every audience member would be familiar, and on this night her text was The Lord's Prayer. One intimate called her voice "the loneliest sound in the world," but my grandfather never commented on the quality of Helen's voice so much as the extraordinary will and effort it took to learn to use it at all.Dorothy Herrmann's biography "Helen Keller: A Life" is well-organized, accessible and a nice companion to the superior "Helen and Teacher" by Joseph P. Lash. She includes anecdotes I had never read before, some of which are fascinating.Everyone knows the dining room scene from "The Miracle Worker," in which Annie and Helen fight to the death to teach the child table manners. In adulthood, Ms. Herrmann notes, when Helen was the guest at an elegant luncheon or dinner party, when she was shown to her seat Helen would pass her hand once lightly over her table setting, memorize its layout, and proceed to eat with manners equal to those of her sighted companions. But she would occasionally interrupt the conversation she could not hear to ask a question, with sometimes awkward results.All her long life, the manual alphabet was Helen's continual link to the outside world; it named objects, gave her directions, and described occurring events or those about to happen. The manual alphabet itself is rudimentary and maddeningly limited. So it was through books that Helen's spirit took flight. Her comprehension of Braille came quickly, and it was through her reading that Helen learned abstract and intangible concepts. Teacher gave her nothing to read but the classics, which captivated Helen, but after Teacher's death she occasionally enjoyed the guilty pleasure of a silly romance novel. Helen learned to do what sighted people do -- which is to read whole words, not individual letters. Teacher insisted that she gain a lot of her knowledge through context, just as a sighted person does. Annie set for Helen a demanding course load, even prior to Helen's entering college, (she graduated with honors from Radcliffe in 1904) which insured that Helen was far more well-rounded academically than the average sighted and hearing woman of her day. (I've long felt that Annie should have received a diploma alongside Helen. After all, she had to learn and understand the same subject matter she translated and interpreted for her pupil. What a feather in her cap that would have been.)Helen acknowledged that exclusive reliance on the manual alphabet for direct communication with others made her a poor conversationalist. She also said late in life that she was still childish in many ways. But these things can be said of many people without her physical limitations.There is an extraordinary section devoted to restoring eyesight to the blind, particularly those who lost their sight in infancy and early childhood. Such operations have been performed only about 20 times, and the end results have not been the gift many patients hoped for but more often a curse. The world they have imagined for years, even though they had tantalizing glimpses of it as small children, bears little or no resemblance to what they are at last able to see. Herrmann notes that had Helen been a candidate for restoration of her sight, she might not have even been able to recognize Teacher. Some patients have no concept of spatial relationships, no understanding of relative sizes of objects; they cannot attach the names of the nouns they have learned to the physical objects they see before them. The process has been so frightening some have attempted suicide.Almost all people with physical disabilities become defined in terms of their limitations, both by others and sometimes themselves. The fascination that Helen Keller held and still holds for people all over the world is rooted in the fact that she refused to accept being deafblind as the sole measure of her identity.Helen Keller was not a genius nor was she a "plaster saint." There was something enigmatic and haunting about her. She was also seemingly without artifice, and possessed of an unquenchable interest in philosophy, other cultures, even music. The reasons she will continue to be studied by schoolchildren and admired by practically everyone are as numerous as the obstacles this remarkable woman overcame.

The book is great, the cover is awesome, the delivery was fast

I've found the story of Helen Killer so moving - the book gives alot of detail and information about the education of the deaf/ blind, and how nowadays people with similar handicaps are achieving much more than ever thought possible.

Very interesting and well researched.

Very interesting

Great book, recommended for anyone who wants a full picture, rather than just the story for 8 year-olds... Very well written.