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.
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).
