Word: helene
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...With Helen and Teacher, Joseph P. Lash introduces the first multi-perspective, carefully-documented and complete book about the life of one of America's genuine heroines. It is definitive; his book recovers old ground, unearths what others left behind and settles the dust on controversies about Helen Keller's life. He brings to his task an enormous talent for research, a kind and penetrating eye and, most importantly, humanity--a feeling for the influence that one person can have upon another...
...Helen and Teacher is much more than a work of mammoth scholarship, however. In nearly 800 pages, Lash has written a multitutde of books--biographies, histories, stories of stormy romance and deep poverty. It is the tale, first and foremost, of course, of Helen Keller's life, from her first encounters with the woman who shaped her life to her last breath...
Where others authors and the bulk of Helen's own writings paint pictures of a one-sided woman, Lash struggles to look beneath her physicial impairments. He fails of course, to escape the conclusion that everyone draws about Helen: here was a child, a woman, an actress of sorts who, in the words of one contemporary, knew "absolutely nothing of the unkindness, hostility, narrow-mindedness, hatefulness and wickedness of the world around her." It is the tale of a woman who, as Lash writes, "spoke the language of love. Despite the deprevation of sight and hearing...she was made...
...Helen and Teacher traces the scope and course of her life, from her rambunctious childhood--she had an energy for knowledge matched by few--from her days as a heady Radcliffe student to her flirtations with socialism and her voyages and work for the blind. The Helen that emerges from Lash's portrait is a woman with "an inexhuastive capacity for enthusiasm and hope." As he does frequently throughout the book, Lash lets Helen describe herself to the reader. After she read Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, Helen wrote a friend that she had found much...
...overcome by the 'tragicalness' of it all, tremulously responsive to the world about her, dazzingly tempermental, able to show and give love, yet occasionally a nurser of longtime grudges and maddeningly obstinate: above all, as Helen notes, a romantic lapsing into reverie at the slightest pretext, creating through imagination and fantasy a world more gorgeously hued than the real one, in which good and evil were splendidly arrayed against each other...