The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Byblos: Our once-a-month Christmas delivery for May–the gifts that the Library of America keeps giving for the same price ($30) I used to pay in the 1990s–is Hellen Keller’s Autobiographies and Other Writings, the other writings consisting of essays, speeches, letters and journals. Hellen Keller (1880-1968) was the first deaf blind college graduate in the United States, as much or more of a conqueror of Everest and the Moon as Hillary and Armstrong, more so because her coinquest was more directky useful to countless others, as landing on the Moon and climbing Everest was not. I wouldn’t diminish vanity discoveries. We need them for inspiration. But we tend to diminish the greater discoveries (like Norman Borlaug saving a billion life of more with his agriculture revolution, or Soviet Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, who literally saved the world when he refused to let loose Soviet nukes on what turned out to be a convincing but false alert of an incoming rain of American ICBMs in 1983, when he had every reason to fear one, with Reagan in the White House). Keller is somewhere up there. She published two autobiographies, The Story of My Life (1903) and The World I Live In (1908). Most of the additional material was never previously collected. The 640-page volume (it would have been longer had significant sections not been in small print) is edited by Kim Nielsen, who wrote The Radical Lives of Helen Keller in 2009, a short political biography. Keller, curiously, dedicated her first biography to Alexander Graham Bell, “who,” she wrote, “has taught the deaf to speak and enabled the listening ear to hear speech from the Atlantic to the Rockies.” (Is it unkind to remind you, reader, of Thoreau’s remark, when he was told that the telegraph had connected Maine to Texas and he asked what they would have to say to each other?) The biography includes illustrations and reproductions of Keller’s handwriting and some telling braille. “It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life,” she opens. The title of an August 1932 essay: “Put Your Husband in the Kitchen.”

—P.T.