View the Table of Contents.
Read the Introduction. "Nielsen has compiled an outstanding collection, including many letters and photos that are being published for the first time. And even if you didn't grow up in Alabama, you may still marvel about how a little girl from Tuscumbia not only beat the odds but also blazed trails."
—Dallas Morning News
"Stunning final chapter."
—The Yale Review
"If you have not read Kim Nielsen's The Radical Lifes of Helen Keller, then I highly recommend it. As a person who has labored through numerous thick volumes on the life of this remarkable deaf-blind woman, I am delighted with Nielsen's concise and refreshing scholarly work. She examines Keller's life from a Disability Studies perspective. The book is enjoyable and easy to read, and it captures Keller's political dimension with great detail, based on such additional-and sometimes chilling-sources as military intelligence and FBI files. Nielsen does great justice to both the subject of her book and to Disability Studies as an emerging field."
—Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education
"This is an important book."
— Altar Magazine
"Nielsen's study challenges our impoverished cultural memories of Keller, which may have for too long served to "flatten" both our understanding not just of Keller's complex, contradictory life, but also the politics of disability, U.S. racialism, and women's political activities."
—On Campus with Women
"The Radical Lives of Helen Keller thus is an important, essential guide for any who would receive a well-rounded survey of her life."
—The Midwest Book Review
"Radical Lives fills out an important dimension of our cultural memory of the adult Helen Keller."
—www.msmagazine.com
"Nielsen's account is thoroughly researched, well organized and extremely well written....a truly important and exciting work."
—Ragged Edge Online
"Nielson examines Helen Keller's radical politics and the various reasons her politcal views were so often neglected."
—Library Journal
"Based on expansive research in wide-ranging materials, including military intelligence and FBI files, Kim Nielsen unveils Helen Keller's political life. This finely written biography helps us understand the movement for disability rights in our own time."
—Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship
"The book's compactness, straightforward writing style, and revolutionary approach make The Radical Lives of Helen Kellerinvaluable for both teachers and scholars. Keller would be delighted that Nielsen allowed her her Scotch." —Journal of American History
"Nielsen's book gives us a Helen Keller for our times. We meet a complex person whose politics defy our reductionist knowledge about her, whose lived experience makes for compelling reading. The Radical Lives of Helen Keller renders three-dimensional, perhaps for the first time, a figure who all too often is known to the world, but known in minimalist flatness merely as a symbol of overcoming disability. Nielsen shows us that there is so much more to Keller—a political activist, theorist, and intellectual with unconventional, and, yes, even uncomfortable, opinions. She forthrightly explores these contradictions, in lucid, readable prose, to allow a very real version of Helen Keller to emerge from the darkness."
—Lennard J. Davis, author of Bending Over Backwards: Essays on Disability and the Body
Several decades after her death in 1968, Helen Keller remains one of the most widely recognized women of the twentieth century. But the fascinating story of her vivid political life—particularly her interest in radicalism and anti-capitalist activism—has been largely overwhelmed by the sentimentalized story of her as a young deaf-blind girl.
Keller had many lives indeed. Best known for her advocacy on behalf of the blind, she was also a member of the socialist party, an advocate of women's suffrage, a defender of the radical International Workers of the World, and a supporter of birth control—and she served as one of the nation's most effective but unofficial international ambassadors. In spite of all her political work, though, Keller rarely explored the political dimensions of disability, adopting beliefs that were often seen as conservative, patronizing, and occasionally repugnant. Under the wing of Alexander Graham Bell, a controversial figure in the deaf community who promoted lip-reading over sign language, Keller became a proponent of oralism, thereby alienating herself from others in the deaf community who believed that a rich deaf culture was possible through sign language. But only by distancing herself from the deaf community was she able to maintain a public image as a one-of-a-kind miracle.
Using analytic tools and new sources, Kim E. Nielsen's political biography of Helen Keller has many lives, teasing out the motivations for and implications of her political and personal revolutions to reveal a more complex and intriguing woman than the Helen Keller we thought we knew.
