A sympathetic account hampered by inadequate and often contradictory source materials.
A largely unsuccessful attempt at a full-scale biography of the difficult, unhappy woman whose life story is inseparable from that of Helen Keller.
Called “Teacher” by Keller and popularly known as “The Miracle Worker,” Anne Sullivan was born into poverty in the late 1800s and suffered intense psychological and physical miseries during a lifetime in which she was mostly dependent on others. Sent to an almshouse by her widowed father at age ten, she lived in the grimmest of conditions until admitted to the Perkins Institution, a famous school for the blind in South Boston. She was not completely blind, but her eyes required numerous surgeries and her sight was always precarious. Her life with Keller began after her graduation from Perkins, and from age 20 until her death she remained with the famous deaf-blind woman. “They lived intricately intertwined lives,” writes Nielsen, “were deeply dependent upon one another, and loved one another profoundly.” Sullivan’s initial role as governess and teacher is well known, but as Nielsen (History and Women’s Studies/Univ. of Wisconsin, Green Bay; Helen Keller: Selected Writings, 2005, etc.) demonstrates, that role evolved over time. It was a painful process, as the stubborn, defensive and proud woman struggled to establish herself as a serious and capable educator. As an adult, Keller became the duo’s breadwinner, supporting them both financially for many years. Marriage to the much younger John Macy came late in Sullivan’s life, and just how it worked for the threesome is unclear. Eventually the Macys separated, but Sullivan and Keller stayed together until the end. Unfortunately, many of the details are murky, and Nielsen is forced to acknowledge that no record of events exists and that her subject’s reactions can only be imagined.
A sympathetic account hampered by inadequate and often contradictory source materials.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8070-5046-0
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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