Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller

Like other reviewers, I found this reappraisal of Helen Keller incredibly thoughtful and well done. Yes, there's a lot of speculation in it but all in the service of pursuing deeper insights. It is also beautifully written -- engaging, humorous, and analytical yet accessible to the average reader. "Blind Rage" is a wonderful contribution to history, women's studies and disability literature.

i wish everyone struggling with a disability would read this book. it gives a historical perspective people ignore. i loved it.

Blind Rage is my new favorite Helen Keller book. No contest. I haven't been this wowed by a book in a long time. The author has such an amazing handle on Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, I sat there grinning at the words as I read them. Over and over again I thought to myself, "Yes, that's just what she would have done/said/felt!" Which is a little presumptuous, I suppose, but it's really something when a complete stranger's interpretation of a person meshes so precisely with your own. Kleege originally wrote these letters to deal with her long-standing personal resentment toward Helen Keller. If you're a blind kid, Helen Keller is understandably the ultimate (and ultimately irritating) example of what you "should" be. But apparently, once she got writing and doing some research on grown-up Helen, she saw that a lot of what people believe about her is essentially a myth. Helen wasn't just a perfect and placid blind lady. It's pretty much a comparison between the public face Helen displayed her entire life and the feelings she must have really had underneath that mask -- crazy and unreasonable feelings like frustration (*gasp*) and anger (eek!). What really knocks me out is how Georgina Kleege interweaves fiction and non-fiction. This whole book is essentially an imagining of how Helen Keller, and sometimes Annie Sullivan, really felt at certain crucial junctures in her life. Considering how uptight I am about historical fiction, it's interesting how much I enjoyed this format. But this book really defies standard genre definitions anyway. The blurb on the back cover calls it "creative non-fiction" and that's an apt description. Kleege begins with the accepted, standard version of an event or relationship in Helen's life, breaks it apart into a set of potential what-ifs, then fills in the emotional gaps with possible scenarios that are written like snippets of a novel. Granted, I'm not as well-versed in Helen's later life as I am in her childhood, but the portrayals of Helen and Annie's characters were so consistent with the way I feel about them, I was constantly unsure of where the line between Kleege's imagination and the real history lay. She interweaves bits and pieces of actual incidents conversations that I sometimes recognized into these scenarios, but much of the time, I couldn't tell if the remainder of the scenes are drawn from sources I haven't seen, of if they were just made up. The overall effect is seamless and arresting. Honestly, I'm a little jealous -- mostly in a good way. This book is so much more complex and deep than mine (Miss Spitfire). But it's written for adults, and deals with Helen's grown-up life, so it has a right to be deeper. This kind of jealousy is actually a special form of admiration. What I'd really like to know is how the general reading population will feel about Blind Rage. (Since I'm such a Helen Keller junkie, I'm sort of doomed to love it, and perhaps not an entirely fair judge.) I bet it's going to