View the Table of Contents.
Read the Introduction.
"Nielsen has compiled an outstanding collection, including many
letters and photos that are being published for the first time. And
even if you didn't grow up in Alabama, you may still marvel about
how a little girl from Tuscumbia not only beat the odds but also
blazed trails."
--"Dallas Morning News"
"Stunning final chapter."
--"The Yale Review"
"If you have not read Kim Nielsen's "The Radical Lifes of Helen
Keller," then I highly recommend it. As a person who has labored
through numerous thick volumes on the life of this remarkable
deaf-blind woman, I am delighted with Nielsen's concise and
refreshing scholarly work. She examines Keller's life from a
Disability Studies perspective. The book is enjoyable and easy to
read, and it captures Keller's political dimension with great
detail, based on such additional-and sometimes chilling-sources as
military intelligence and FBI files. Nielsen does great justice to
both the subject of her book and to Disability Studies as an
emerging field."
--"Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education"
"This is an important book."
-- "Altar Magazine"
"Nielsen's study challenges our impoverished cultural memories
of Keller, which may have for too long served to "flatten" both our
understanding not just of Keller's complex, contradictory life, but
also the politics of disability, U.S. racialism, and women's
political activities."
--"On Campus with Women"
""The Radical Lives of Helen Keller" thus is an important,
essential guide for any who would receive a well-rounded survey of
her life."
--"The Midwest Book Review"
""Radical Lives" fills out an important dimension ofour cultural
memory of the adult Helen Keller."
--"www.msmagazine.com"
"Nielsen's account is thoroughly researched, well organized and
extremely well written....a truly important and exciting
work."
--"Ragged Edge Online"
"Nielson examines Helen Keller's radical politics and the
various reasons her politcal views were so often neglected."
--"Library Journal"
"Based on expansive research in wide-ranging materials,
including military intelligence and FBI files, Kim Nielsen unveils
Helen Keller's political life. This finely written biography helps
us understand the movement for disability rights in our own
time."
--Linda K. Kerber, author of "No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies:
Women and the Obligations of Citizenship"
"The book's compactness, straightforward writing style, and
revolutionary approach make "The Radical Lives of Helen
Keller"invaluable for both teachers and scholars. Keller would be
delighted that Nielsen allowed her her Scotch." --"Journal of
American History"
"Nielsen's book gives us a Helen Keller for our times. We meet a
complex person whose politics defy our reductionist knowledge about
her, whose lived experience makes for compelling reading. "The
Radical Lives of Helen Keller" renders three-dimensional, perhaps
for the first time, a figure who all too often is known to the
world, but known in minimalist flatness merely as a symbol of
overcoming disability. Nielsen shows us that there is so much more
to Keller--a political activist, theorist, and intellectual with
unconventional, and, yes, even uncomfortable, opinions. She
forthrightly explores these contradictions, in lucid, readable
prose, to allow a very real version of Helen Keller toemerge from
the darkness."
--Lennard J. Davis, author of "Bending Over Backwards: Essays on
Disability and the Body"
Several decades after her death in 1968, Helen Keller remains
one of the most widely recognized women of the twentieth century.
But the fascinating story of her vivid political life--particularly
her interest in radicalism and anti-capitalist activism--has been
largely overwhelmed by the sentimentalized story of her as a young
deaf-blind girl.
Keller had many lives indeed. Best known for her advocacy on
behalf of the blind, she was also a member of the socialist party,
an advocate of women's suffrage, a defender of the radical
International Workers of the World, and a supporter of birth
control--and she served as one of the nation's most effective but
unofficial international ambassadors. In spite of all her political
work, though, Keller rarely explored the political dimensions of
disability, adopting beliefs that were often seen as conservative,
patronizing, and occasionally repugnant. Under the wing of
Alexander Graham Bell, a controversial figure in the deaf community
who promoted lip-reading over sign language, Keller became a
proponent of oralism, thereby alienating herself from others in the
deaf community who believed that a rich deaf culture was possible
through sign language. But only by distancing herself from the deaf
community was she able to maintain a public image as a
one-of-a-kind miracle.
Using analytic tools and new sources, Kim E. Nielsen's political
biography of Helen Keller has many lives, teasing out the
motivations for and implications of her political and personal
revolutions to reveal a more complex and intriguing woman than the
HelenKeller we thought we knew.
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