The World At Her Fingertips: Story Of Helen Keller, The

I was familiar with the story of Helen Keller as a child and a young woman: her miraculous learning of language, her amazing graduation from Radcliffe -- but I did not know much about what went on later.

Despite her being an international celebrity and despite her tremendous accomplishments, Helen Keller remained very handicapped and totally dependent on others to be able to survive in the world. She basically only earned a living by marketing herself as a curiosity. One thing that I had never realized was that Helen Keller was unusually beautiful, with an expressive face, not at all what one might have expected from a blind, deaf person -- which is apparently part of what made her so marketable.

This book follows her until the very end, when she died at 87.

The book is an easy read, being made for children, or adolescents, and presents a very realistic point of view. I would recommend it for younger teenage girls, or for anyone who wants a quick and painless review of Helen Keller's whole life.


The Truth comes out in the story of Helen Keller!!   October 24, 2001
 2 out of 3 found this review helpful

I really did enjoy the story of Helen Keler. It was a very amusing
tale.Most people thought that the story was funny,but I did not.
When we had watched the movie last year Many persons had laughed at it.When they laughed it was like they were looking at me and laughing because I liked the story and also read the story.


Four and a half stars...   October 19, 2001
 2 out of 2 found this review helpful

This book was most defnitely an interesting to read, if not altogether a delight. The intricacies of the relationships that Helen Keller experienced with Annie Sullivan, her mother, Alexander Graham Bell, the socialist party, the Roosevelts, and John Macy, were given careful attention that have been lacking in many of the other books that I have read on Helen Keller. Helen proved to be an extremely fascinating woman rather than just the product of Annie Sullivan's genius at teaching.

Joan Dash's work is to be highly commended. If there is one flaw with her work, it is that some of the sections are slow and cumbersome to read in comparison with the rest of the book. It misses the five star mark only because it is not an altogether smooth read. Nonetheless, Dash's work should be viewed as a treasure amongst Helen Keller biographies for decades to come.

Crazy James


A more complete picture of an extraordinary person's life   June 5, 2001
 7 out of 7 found this review helpful

As a young child, the story of Helen Keller intrigued me, and I read many books about her. However, none of them presents as a complete a picture as this one.

I think it would probably help in reading this book if you already "know" the story of Helen Keller, because while Dash talks about things like "the miracle at the well", she does not make these events the entire focus of this book. Even in Helen's lifetime, people were amazed by the stunning events of her childhood, and seem to think that that was all there was to her.

In this biography, Dash sets out to talk not just about Helen Keller's childhood, but her whole life. She talks about Helen's disillusionment with what college was about. In all the books I had read about Helen Keller before, including her own "The Story of My Life", I did not know that she was a Socialist or that there were many times when she and Annie were uncertain as to what they would do in the future. Furthermore, though I knew that in later years there was a woman named Polly Thompson who also helped Helen, I never knew anything more about her than her name. In this book, I finally was able to learn more about things that were never mentioned in other "kids'" biographies, and I was glad of that.

The only thing that was a little sad was that I realized more that Helen Keller was human, rather than just the prodigious child who could overcome anything that I kept reading about when I was younger. She grew up, and she had her share of sorrows and joys, ambitions and setbacks. If you are really interested in her entire life, this is the book to read.