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A review by cocoonofbooks
The Story of My Life, with eBook by Helen Keller, Frances Cassidy
4.0
I didn't realize how little I knew of Helen Keller's life until reading this autobiography. It's mind-boggling to think of what she accomplished, even given the obvious privilege she enjoyed through her family's wealth and connections. She lived at a time when sign language was only just being introduced and consisted solely of fingerspelling, so the majority of her communication was via spelling out every single word into someone's hand. Her teacher, Anne Sullivan, went with her to college and freaking fingerspelled all of Helen's lectures into her hand. Helen herself, as she points out, could not take any notes because her hands were busy "listening," so she had to take notes later on her typewriter from memory. She had to learn three different braille systems and struggled with her final math exam because she'd had to cram on a braille system she was less familiar with so she could read all the mathematical symbols. If all of that weren't enough, she learned to speak and could read lips with her hands so she could have conversations with people who didn't know the "manual alphabet" of fingerspelling. She knew French and German and read books in both languages. She and Anne Sullivan were both badasses.
Leaving aside the amazingness of her capacity for learning, the book was enjoyable to read. She writes beautifully about nature and many other things, and generally seems to have had a joyful and optimistic spirit. Much of what she writes is surprisingly relatable as well. I particularly appreciated the passage in which she talks about what it's like to be in college, reading five different books at once so you mix them up and enjoy none of them, cramming for test and then getting to the exam and remembering hundreds of things but drawing a blank on the one thing you're asked to write about.
I would have liked some more detail at times — for example, she alludes to her father's death early on as being a traumatic point in her life, but when she reaches that part of her life chronologically she skips right over it. We hear about Anne Sullivan accompanying her to college but afterwards it's unclear where she lived and with whom, and if Anne was always with her or if her mother served as her translator some of the time. She also makes a lot of references to famous people she was friends with, some of whom I was not familiar with. So it would have been helpful to have more detail at times.
There are probably great biographies of Helen Keller by now that explain much of this missing information about her life, and if you're just looking to be impressed by her accomplishments you could certainly learn about that elsewhere. But for her excellent writing and especially the description of nature (from the perspective of someone who felt and smelled all the seasonal changes), I think this is worth a read.
Leaving aside the amazingness of her capacity for learning, the book was enjoyable to read. She writes beautifully about nature and many other things, and generally seems to have had a joyful and optimistic spirit. Much of what she writes is surprisingly relatable as well. I particularly appreciated the passage in which she talks about what it's like to be in college, reading five different books at once so you mix them up and enjoy none of them, cramming for test and then getting to the exam and remembering hundreds of things but drawing a blank on the one thing you're asked to write about.
I would have liked some more detail at times — for example, she alludes to her father's death early on as being a traumatic point in her life, but when she reaches that part of her life chronologically she skips right over it. We hear about Anne Sullivan accompanying her to college but afterwards it's unclear where she lived and with whom, and if Anne was always with her or if her mother served as her translator some of the time. She also makes a lot of references to famous people she was friends with, some of whom I was not familiar with. So it would have been helpful to have more detail at times.
There are probably great biographies of Helen Keller by now that explain much of this missing information about her life, and if you're just looking to be impressed by her accomplishments you could certainly learn about that elsewhere. But for her excellent writing and especially the description of nature (from the perspective of someone who felt and smelled all the seasonal changes), I think this is worth a read.