Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“I forgot that I owed my success partly to the advantages of my birth and environment, and largely to the helpfulness of others.”

Midstream: My Later Life by Helen Keller

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Keller is, of course, famous for being both deaf and mute and her journey to find a way to develop and communicate with the world outside her mind. Her first autobiography follows her journey to university. This autobiography finds Keller in mid life, having experienced the world as an adult. I first became interested in Helen Keller through a couple articles I read in which she, as it turned out, had a lot more opinions than just with respect to her disabilities (shocking, I know). […]

“Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.”

The Story of My Life by Helen Keller

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It’s strange to say that I’m disappointed in a auto/biography, but here we are, and to be fair, this is a failure of expectations more than a failure of the book itself, because it was published in 1903, and what I was curious about didn’t happen until well after. Plot: The Story of My Life follows the famous Helen Keller from her birth to just before she became the first deafblind person to graduate from college. The first third was written by her with the […]

When a piece of history tries to make peace

Tails from History: A Puppy for Helen Keller by May Nakamura

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Tails from History: A Puppy for Helen Keller shows how the author, May Nakamura, is obviously a fan of their subject. You can tell how admired Keller was in her quest for peace, you can Nakamura likes dogs and of course the Akita breed and you can tell she admires the Japanese people and land. But also, you get a fun story about a small slice of a person who was a trailblazer on so many levels. This, perhaps little-known part of Keller’s life, was […]

I do not feel each letter any more than you see each letter as you see and read.

Story of My Life by Helen Keller

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You know it’s 2019 that as I read a memoir from 1903, written by a woman in Alabama, I am on edge but then relieved that we made it through the whole thing without a use of the “N-word!” But that’s not being fair. You, like I have, have probably read or seen The Miracle Worker. If you’re like me, that doesn’t mean you’ve ever read the original memoir that Helen Keller wrote. And it’s perfectly good and a good early example (or at least […]



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