This biography ably chronicles the long, remarkable life of the deaf/blind prodigy, mystic, and socialist Keller and her longtime teacher and helpmeet, Anne Sullivan, who taught her to communicate with the world. Keller, born in 1880 in rural Alabama, developed at age 19 months a grave case of what Herrmann says was probably scarlet fever or meningitis. She recovered but lost total hearing and sight, becoming increasingly frustrated and unruly in the ensuing years. Herrmann recounts the thrilling story of Sullivan’s “breaking through” to the wild child (a tale familiar to viewers of the 1962 film The Miracle Worker). “By the end of their first year together,” writes Herrmann, “Annie was spelling into Helen’s hand stories from The Iliad and The Odyssey.” Herrmann charts how various powerful men, including Alexander Graham Bell, facilitated, perhaps out of mixed motives, the creation of Helen’s public persona, both before and after the celebrated young Keller’s entrance to Radcliffe College. Later, with publication of her autobiography (the first of many books), Keller achieved lasting international fame. A theatrical agent, around the time of the 1918 film about Keller, Deliverance (in which Helen played herself in some of the scenes), observed that “after Helen’s release from silence and darkness, nothing dramatic happened to her.” This, of course, will be part of the problem with any biography of Keller. Her postcollegiate years included a never-ending round of lecture tours, and even a stint with Sullivan as a vaudeville regular from 1920 to 1924, activities supported by her popularity but also necessitated by economics. For that and other reasons, the widely revered Keller, who lived to age 88, comes off as something of a sad if stoic figure. A fairly lively slice of American social history, but lacking in its later pages much inherent excitement. Keller’s life, exceptional as it was, is no match for that of Herrmann’s earlier subject, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. (64 photos) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 12, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-44354-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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