Customer Reviews

Helen Keller: A Life

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3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
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I've long been a reader of books on Helen Keller. As a deaf person and an educator who uses her words in my own life and teachings, I feel it is important to know the person I am talking about. I often use Helen Keller as an example to others with disabilities whom I teach, and this book is a useful addition to my library. My only reason for giving it a four and not a five star rating is Dorothy Herrmann speculates quite a bit about the thoughts and feeling of two women who lived over 75 years ago. Much of their private lives has been speculated about, but we cannot know the truth about these matters when they are no longer here to tell us. I also get the feeling the author is a bit of a Freudian psychologist, and allows this to influence her writings of the people surrounding Helen and Annie. Sometimes, innocence is just innocence and there is no need to make it salacious for the public. Is it so hard to believe that some people are just innately good? Many of the things that happened to Helen Keller were typical of the lives of women at that point. I see it in the geneaological work in my own family. Women didn't have a lot of choices, and women with disabilities had absolutely none. However, Helen was one of those people who brought out the best in others, and the protective qualities in men. As a deaf person who has both men and women for friends who are protective of me, I can understand teasing in letters which have no negative connotation of any kind. I am married, but these friends still look out for me. Both my husband and me understand why they do this and feel this way, and it is sweet, with nothing in it that has an underlying meaning. I think we can look at the relationships of Helen with most men that way, rather than assuming the worst on either side. Otherwise, the book is very well written, and certainly extremely readable in comparison to other biographies about Helen Keller.

Helen Keller calls the day she understood the basic concept of language was that all things have names "her soul's birthday." Helen herself says that "Teacher," the name Annie Sullivan insisted Helen use for her literally led her out of a dark silent world and into one where communication was possible.

Many works on Ms. Keller seem to get stuck on the now famous scene at the water pump when Annie spells "water" into Helen's outstretched hand. This author, to her credit, provides a rich source of information and introduces the readers at large to Helen the student, Helen the writer, Helen the adult and Helen as one third of a strange triadic relationship when her beloved "Teacher" marries a gifted editor named John Macy.

Helen and Annie had a rather symbiotic relationship and this was never made more apparent than when other educators as well as Helen's mother tried to prize them apart. John Macy, Annie's long suffering husband tired of having to include Helen in every aspect of his married life and felt that Annie was making Helen "more of an institution than a woman." He further charged Annie with being a self serving promotor and felt that Helen was being exploited.

This work does indeed raise some very interesting ideas. Annie does indeed have a punitive streak, no doubt influenced by her abusive, alcoholic father and the lost years she spent in the alms-house. The alms-house was, by all accounts a genuine Chamber of Horrors and no provisions were made for children. Annie survived the gritty horrors, including the death of her beloved baby brother, Jimmie. Hardened and determined after years of battling poor vision due to trachoma, she makes a fine academic showing at the Perkins School for the Blind prior to her assignment with Helen.

During the early part of their symbiotic relationship, Annie would slap Helen into submission. The now infamous Battle Over Breakfast was a case in point. Annie slapped Helen each time the child tried to take food off Annie's plate. She also slapped Helen each time she pinched her in rage.

Annie would use similar exacting methods on Helen in later years. When Helen learned to type, Annie would have her redo a page many times until it was picture perfect. Indeed, this too, presented problems in Annie's marriage. When she and John Macy split, the letters he received from "Helen" had hand written corrections and were rife with expressions that were plainly Annie's. One can only speculate that John was correct in his assessment of Helen being exploited to a certain extent.

This book takes into account Helen's concept of spirituality and her fascination with Swedenborgianism, a faith rooted in "a perfect afterlife where nobody is handicapped." Helen clings to this faith and later to an especially inflammatory branch of Socialism. She becomes quite political and writes numerous articles expressing her beliefs. In so doing, Helen remains fixed in the public eye as the Crusader for persons both deaf and blind.

This is truly an excellent biography that explores the sensual side of Helen, the spiritual, the political and the personal make up of this quite extraordinary woman. It is a refreshing trip far down the road that leads the readers way beyond the water pump.

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).

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?

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.

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

The facts of Helen Keller's early life are widely known, thanks to the 1959 stage play (and later film) by William Gibson, The Miracle Worker. There are a number of excellent biographies detailing Helen's later life, and in fact her own autobiographical books remain in print and testify to her wide interests and sometimes startling achievements. Biographer Dorothy Herrmann's Helen Keller: A Life, first published in 1999, is a comprehensive addition to the canon.

Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama in 1880. At the age of nineteen months she was stricken with scarlet fever--or perhaps rubella or meningitis, according to Herrmann--and was left blind, deaf and mute. When she was seven years old she was released from her isolation by the young Annie Sullivan who taught her to communicate by spelling into her hand.

Annie stayed on as teacher, translator, editor and companion until her death in 1936, after which the torch was passed to other companion-caregivers. Helen spent some time at the Perkins Institute for the Blind, always primarily under Annie's tutelage, and later was admitted to Radcliffe College, becoming the first deaf blind person ever awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree. In spite of the difficulties that writing and editing presented to her, Helen wrote a number of books and articles throughout her life. She had close relationships with Alexander Graham Bell, Samuel Clemens, and a number of other notables of her time. Earning a living for herself and her entourage was always a necessity for Helen, and she spent four years on the vaudeville circuit with an act detailing her life and accomplishments. She also earned a living through writing and extensive lecturing (with the assistance of Annie Sullivan, who interpreted for her). In later life she became a fundraiser for the American Foundation for the Blind, and traveled extensively around the world on speaking and fundraising tours. She did this work until she was incapacitated by a series of strokes, six years before her death in 1968 at nearly 88 years of age.

Helen's passion for better opportunities for the disabled led her to the same desire for the working classes; she was a radical socialist, suffragist, member of the activist labor union International Workers of the World (the Wobblies), and a pacifist who opposed the U.S. entry into the First World War.

Author Herrmann thoroughly details the point of view that Helen, dependent as she was on her companions to "frame" the world for her, was to some extent a construct of those companions. Herrmann maintains that Helen was presented to the world as a "secular saint" because that's what the world wanted to see in a handicapped person. Her radical political attitudes, which themselves are attributed largely to Annie's husband John Macy, were a source of embarrassment to Helen's family and her benefactors, and eventually to the Foundation for the Blind which suppressed mention of them as much as possible. The Foundation also in later years controlled all photos of Helen and only allowed publication of those which made her look sweet, happy--and "normal."

Helen, for all the wonderful achievements of her life and the awards that were bestowed on her, was never able to live independently. Herrmann finishes with the factors that influence a deaf-blind person's possibilities. Those who are raised deaf and later become blind (or vice versa), for example, are in a different situation from those deaf and blind from birth. She briefly outlines modern teaching philosophies that allow the deaf-blind to live more independent lives, and mentions a number of high-achieving deaf-blind people who have benefited from them.

Helen Keller was a child of her time. Once the life of a Southern belle was taken from her by disability, her outlook was extremely grim--until Annie Sullivan came into her life. However the credit for Helen's accomplishments is divided up, whatever the truth behind the legend, she must be recognized as one of the outstanding women of her age. Dorothy Herrmann asks many questions that can't be answered, and that's not a bad thing in a biography of a woman so well-documented but so unknowable.

I listened to the unabridged audio of this book (which is not available through Amazon), read by Mary Peiffer.

Linda Bulger, 2009

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.

I found this book very interesting as well as revealing about the life of Helen Keller. As pointed out in the book, many of us know Helen as the little girl at the well in 'The Miracle Worker'. However, Helen Keller lived a long and fulfilling life despite her handicaps some of which had nothing to do with her physical handicap. Helen is revealed as an intelligent (not a genius), attractive woman who represented the ultimate in overcoming handicaps. Helen was also willful, opinionated, many times demanding, as well as an avid socialist who admired the works of Marx among others. These traits show her to be human and intriguing, an accomplished person who spent the majority of her life dependent upon other people, but who was well traveled and experienced in many of life's joys as well as its pettinesses and jealousies. She fought for equal rights for all as well as for the blind and deaf. This book brings the many aspects of Helen's life together in one place, and shows us the many facet's of this remarkable woman's life and times. I highly recommend it.

If her perspective is accurate - and it is certainly compelling - then Herrmann has accomplished something extraordinary in giving us this realistic picture of Helen Keller's life. Earlier biographies of Helen made you feel like Helen was otherworldly; Herrmann's telling is a much more sad tale - and more believable. Nicely written, although the story seems to lose its way after the death of Annie Sullivan Macy, which could be a reflection of what happened to Helen. Great photos too.