Word: lashes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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'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...
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...
...Helen's need of Teacher is obvious," Lash writes of Annie's work, the tireless hours spent spelling whole books into her pupil's hands, the sacrifice of her own impaired eyes. "But equally powerful was Teacher's reliance on Helen to keep her misanthropic impulses under control and to give her a sense of purpose in life." Annie saw and spoke for Helen; Helen loved and protected the woman she called Teacher in return. Their relationship was at once prosaic and parasitic. With Annie's death, Helen wrote a close friend, "For a while, I feel...
...When Lash set out to write Helen and Teacher, few people saw a need for another book on Helen Keller. But his book is likely to remain the last word on the subject for some time--at least until more new evidence is discovered. Lash's story is long and exhausting at times, but it is always enlightening and, above all, heartening. "God gave us life for happiness not misery," Helen Keller told one reporter on her 80th birthday. "I believe that happiness, attained, should be shared...