sipsrmeast"—By Helen Keller, Lone dont Hodder & Stoughton.
In this volume Miss Keller con. tines "The Story of My Life, which was published a few years ago, and in which we saw, despite the' innate modesty of the autobiographer, evidence of achieve ments which were little short of a miracle, Miss Keller is indeed an intellectual phenomenon. If you count her series of dazzling triumphs, discounting the great megaphones of publicity which have followed her, trumpeting truth and. untruth with equal fury, the fact, remains that from the time of her childhood she has been a mental prodigy.
Helen Keller was Lorn, a perfectly healthy and normal' child, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, on June '27, 1880. At' the age of eighteen months she was stricken with a severe illness, the exact nature of which is not known. It left her dear and blind; as a result of the deafness she soon became dumb also. For five years she remained in this unfortunate condition. Then, through Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, to whom her father appealed because he knew Dr. Bell's interest in the deaf, Miss Keller was pat under the care and attention of Miss) Anne Masefield Sullivan, a young graduate of the Perkins Institution for the Blind at Boston, Massachusettes. From this point. onward the story of her life reads like a fairy tale, Within a month the teacher had presented the gift, of language to her little pupil Some years later in a college for rormal girls to which she was admitted reluctantly and without favour, she won a degree cum laude in the same length of time it took her classmates to win theirs.
She has learned to speak—only deaf-blind person in Amei of whom this is true. She has acted in motion pictures and vaudeville, lectured throughout the United States and Canada, written ten books provocative of discussion, and, since her graduation from college, has taken part in every major movement on behalf of the blind in the United States.
'A singular quality of mind—something of "sweetness and light—manifested in "Midstream," a clarity of intellect which" has enabled Miss Keller to regard her: physical weakness in a philosophical manner, totally untinged with a bitterness against Fate or self-pit "I am not amongst the victims of unjust laws," she states. "The struggle I have gone through is no worse than, indeed, it is not so grinding as, that of the majority of men and women who are emeshed in economic problems which they are incapable of solving.
As a human document stream"—the, chronicle of a —not unmixed with wonder—Ex,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.