| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Radical Lives of Helen Keller. By Kim E. Nielsen. (New York: New York University Press, 2004. xiv, 178 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-8147-5813-4.)

"She liked Scotch, not tea" (p. 142). So concludes the latest biography of Helen Keller (1880–1968), the first of the more than two hundred biographies of the world's most famous disabled person that has been written by a trained historian. While nearly all of them have been for children, the ones for adults have done little to rescue the cultural icon from the role of the cheerful, inspirational little girl who learned to say "water" by a pump or the elderly apolitical goodwill ambassador who spread bland messages of peace. Through Kim E. Nielsen's The Radical Lives of Helen Keller, we meet a woman who cared passionately about politics, particularly women's rights, and who struggled against the oppressive forces of capitalism and the dangers of American insensitivity to the outside world. This portrait is strikingly absent even from copiously documented popular works such as Joseph P. Lash's Helen and Teacher (1980) and Dorothy Herrmann's Helen Keller: A Life (1998). Not seeking to tear down an idol, Nielsen offers a greater understanding of a complex woman living in complex times framed largely by the Cold War. She also explores the underlying cultural assumptions that have relegated Keller to a simultaneously monolithic and narrow role throughout her life and beyond.

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