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- Article from:
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The News & Record (Piedmont Triad, NC)
- Article date:
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March 28, 1999
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Copyright informationCOPYRIGHT 1999 News & Record. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Byline: STEVE SUMERFORD
HELEN KELLER
A Life
By Dorothy Hermann
Alfred A. Knopf
394 pages. $30.
The inspiring Helen Keller story that we all know and love is a half-truth. The school textbooks and Hollywood movies have frozen in time one moment in Keller's long and controversial life: the blind and deaf 7-year-old girl suddenly cracking the mystery of language at the water pump behind her Alabama farmhouse, as her teacher, Annie Sullivan, finger-spelled "w-a-t-e-r" into one of her hands while she poured water into the other.
What the movies and textbooks don't tell is that Keller lived another 80 years, and that she used her international fame ...