Helen Keller : A Life

Rating:
Summary: Eye-opening (pun intended)
Review: A lot of what I had heard about Helen Keller was how she was so angelic, pure, etc. A lot of what is written about Helen Keller focuses on her persistance and heroism. They do not describe Helen's struggles and defeats.

While not capitalizing on sensationalism, this book presents a "real-life" Helen Keller, Anne Sullivan (Macy) and others of Helen's close circle.

This book presents Helen and those closest to her as very human: Helen's mother's ambivilance about Helen even after Helen's fame; Helen's romantic love and near-elopement; Helen's struggle with writing and original expression.

Rating:
Summary: Anne Sullivan Given Special Attention
Review: Anne Sullivan (Helen Kellers teacher) is probably my biggest hero.
She endured a life of harsh physical pain from various ailments. Any direct exposer to sunlight caused her eyes agonizing pain. She was also plagued with intense emotional trauma, Orphaned, Anne and her younger brother both were shipped to an asylum where they played with rats as toys and frequently were housed in the room where they kept the dead bodies. The year Anne stayed there 70 babies were admitted, 60 died, as did Anne's brother. Anne had seen more death and pain by age 7 then many hardened solders. It was difficult for most people to understand her cantankerous personality and tendency to fly off the handle. It was said at the school she attended she would have been expelled many times, if they had someplace to expell her to. Despite these setbacks she saw Helen Keller, another girl people gave up on and showed her the world of language and communication. This new biography strips away all the well meaning sentimentality and shows us two souls, bruised and scared, but beautiful

Rating:
Summary: Very insightful...with a couple of minor caveats or nitpicks
Review: 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:
Summary: an excellent biography...on a fascinating/disturbing subject
Review: I found this an excellent biography...and it surprised me how much more disturbed I was by the life of Helen Keller and by her relationships with others, particularly Annie Sullivan, than I was before reading this book. I think anyone who previously thought Helen Keller was a happy and joyous woman would realize how mistaken that idea is. although the reality of her triumph over hardship can never be diminished, and for that she will always be a model of inspiration, she strikes me as having been an often extremely sad, emotionally shut down and isolated woman...but mostly someone who lived behind a major false front and "put on a happy face" to survive.

strong points: very well researched, clearly and carefully written, often insightful, not shying away from taboo topics (sexuality, alcoholism, child abuse), all in all quite readable

a quick gripe: I feel Herrmann could have been more interpretive about the relationship between Helen and Annie. while reading the book I often found myself feeling that Helen and Annie's relationship (and Helen herself) was far more disturbed - unbalanced - than even Herrmann was concluding.

Rating:
Summary: Look - no sound
Review: I got the DVD of the original "Miracle Worker". Had a real impact on me. I wanted to learn more about Ms. Keller's life and this book is doing it for me. I decided on this specific book by reading on-line-reviews.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, but too disturbing
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Good, traditional narrative work on Helen Keller
Review: 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:
Summary: Helen Keller Loves Martinis
Review: This is a wonderful addition to all the bios on these two remarkable women. While the definitive is "Helen and Teacher," by Joseph Lash, this book adds lots of interesting details. I had no idea that Helen had her eyes replaced with plastic ones (hence the full face photos in adulthood) or that she enjoyed martinis, high heels and fur coats. What a woman! This is a very enjoyable book with plenty of great photographs. I wonder how much of Helen and Annie's fame was based on their youthful beauty?

Rating:
Summary: An excellent biography
Review: This was one of those books you can't stop reading. The author does a really nice job chronicling Helen's life; the book is entertaining from cover to cover.

I was deeply moved, reading about Helen's struggle with her disability, and how her mother forbidded her to have any type of relationship with men, stripping her of her rights as an adult. There are many poignant moments throughout the book, such as when Helen is emotionally crushed after she is accused of plagiarism. Helen Keller's story is an inspirational one, and well worth reading.