Word: helens
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...Helen and Teacher touches upon the happier parts of Helen's life--her experiences as a writer, her lasting friendships with the great men of the age (Alexander Graham Bell, Mark Twain, and Franklin D. Roosevelt '04, who proclaimed that "Anything Helen Keller is for, I am for.") Yet while doing justice to Helen's great achievements, Lash does not avoid the darker sides of her life--the split with Dr. James Anagnos, the director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind; Helen's failure to find gray tones among the blacks and whites of morality; and her eagerness...
...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...
...HELEN LIVED largely a charmed life, Annie's story--which makes up the other half of the book--was far from rosy. Raised in the orphans' home at Tewksbury and ashamed to admit it, forever asserting her intelligence and trying to "protect" Helen from other people, Anne Sullivan Macy was at once the driving force behind Helen's life and the eyes that blinded Helen to many things. Annie was not a crusader like Helen; at one point, she felt publicity about the "miracle" would ruin her efforts to hold onto Helen; and she complained bitterly when not given credit...
This combination of Helen's bright side and Annie's dark--of pupil and teacher, optimist and pessimist--makes Lash's study fascinating. "One approached the world with a chip on her shoulder and assumed everyone was ready to knock it off; the other reached out to the world with a heart filled with love and kindness and assumed the world would reciprocate. It was the difference between the manners of Tewksbury and Tuscumbia." Without Annie--or when an outside force, such as John Macy intervened--Helen was at a loss. Without Helen, Annie was angry, vindictive...