Word: lash
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...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 to hit the vaudeville circuit to support herself...
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...
...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 of the protagonist...
...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 for her work. She was, Lash concludes...