LIGHT IN THE DARK

There seems to have been no humanitarian cause of the 19th century on which Samuel Gridley Howe did not take the unpopular stance. This is to say that he thought the blind could and should be educated; that the insane did not have to be equated with criminals; that slavery should be abolished; and that Negroes once freed, deserved equal rights. He also crusaded against education by corporal punishment and was one of the few Americans to take part in the Greek War of Independence. Younger readers will be most familiar with Howe through the stories of his work with Laura Bridgman, the deaf/blind girl he successfully taught at Perkins Institute in Massachusetts. His lifelong contempt for money and his undiminishing zeal for every idealistic cause will make him a subject for reader-identification at this level. This biography was carefully researched and written so that a life of adventurous ideas reads with as such verve as any career on the battlefield.