The Story of My Life by Helen Keller-17

I find the concept of this story fascinating, someone who is both blind and death achieving a college education and living a full life is an amazing thought. I tip my hat to Helen Keller, her family, her teacher, and all the other people who helped her achieve such success.

Unfortunately, the story itself is not as fascinating. A large portion of it was spoiled for me by my time in public school, during which we were forced to watch part of the Helen Keller movie in one of their themed education days. They've done similar things with the holocaust, slavery, presidents, and other things. With the exception of the holocaust, which is covered over the course of weeks with way too much focus without adding new information to the curriculum each year, these themed days usually end up with us watching part of a arbitrarily selected movie that serves the purpose of fulfilling the school's "moral obligation" to teach the material and then never seeing it again.

The rest of the story doesn't really have much to enjoy, the best parts of the book take place in Helen's childhood, when she was first learning how to learn things, which was consequently the part that was spoiled for me. After that the biography is rather dry, and unfortunately is the part I didn't know about and had to read thoroughly.

At the end of the biography itself was a collection of some of Helen Keller's letters as she matured, these were interesting at first, watching the writing progress from awful to bad to decent and then finally to good quality was entertaining. After the letters reached perfection the novelty wore off, and the rest of the letters reverted to the overall dull status of the rest of the book.

So in the end my experience with the book was a bit lackluster. However, I do want to say something for the sake of anyone who is being driven away from this book by this blog post. If you do not know the story of Helen Keller and have not had things spoiled by the movie then you should DEFINITELY read this book. The story of a blind and deaf girl becoming educated is inspirational, and if you have yet to receive that inspiration then you should do so. The only reason I did not enjoy the book is because it was spoiled for me long ago, nothing else, it is written well and to anyone other than me it would be very enjoyable.

With that said it is time for me to write my next blog post, so until I post again farewell.