Helen Keller: A Life.

• Author: Wolfe, Kathi

Helen Keller: A Life by Dorothy Herrmann Alfred A. Knopf. 394 pages. $30.00.

I wanted nothing to do with Helen Keller when I was growing up visually impaired.

If I griped about anything, my parents told me that Helen Keller never complained. A teacher once told me that if I were Helen Keller, "You would do your math homework."

But Keller's life and work went far beyond her inspirational, iconic image.

Many of us still think of Keller as the sweet little girl in The Miracle Worker or as the heroic woman who worked tirelessly to help blind people. Few know about the complexity or politics of Keller's life.

This may change because of Dorothy Herrmann's book Helen Keller. As Herrmann notes, "The real Helen Keller did grow up and live a life that was more problematic than her inspiring childhood."

"In her lifetime, Helen was either venerated as a saint or damned as a fraud," Herrmann writes.

But this book helps us understand Keller's contribution to her time by taking us beyond that dichotomy. Like most of us, Keller had her share of conflicts and personality quirks.

Born in 1880, Keller became blind and deaf when she was eighteen months old. Annie Sullivan, visually impaired herself, opened seven-year-old Helen to life by teaching her the meaning of language.

When she was twelve, Keller wrote a story called "The Frost King." She was devastated to learn, after it had been published, that the tale was similar to "The Frost Fairies" by Margaret T. Canby. It's likely that Sullivan had read this story to Keller.

Though Keller denied that she'd plagiarized the work, the charges scarred her for the rest of her life.

Herrmann shows how Keller forged a life for herself at a time when most people with her disabilities would have been prevented from leaving the family home or an institution--let alone going out in public. She earned a degree from Radeliffe College in 1904 and went on to become a writer, a lecturer, a socialist, a vaudeville performer, and an advocate for the blind.

Like many idealistic people, Herrmann informs us, Keller loved humanity, but sometimes found it difficult to love individuals.

Though Keller once described philanthropy as "a tragic apology for wrong conditions," she used her position as chief fundraiser for the American Foundation for the Blind for more than forty years to maintain a very comfortable lifestyle for herself and her assistants. Keller liked the finer things in life. She wore furs and sipped martinis, Herrmann...