What is Visible (Book Post)

I read Kimberly Elkins's What Is Visible over the holiday weekend. Review is on Goodreads but it's also right here!

What Is Visible

Kimberly Elkins attempts to bring to life (but takes great liberties with the historical record) Laura Bridgman, the blind/deaf-mute who enchanted the world and inspired Helen Keller's mother to contact her school, the Perkins Institution, for instruction.  The result of her effort, as one who has long been interested in the lives of both Helen Keller and Laura Bridgman, is quite successful. Elkins creates a rich yet plausible interior world for Laura, revealing a woman who has the ferocious spirit of a tiger with the affectionate inclinations of a kitten, to paraphase Elkins's Julia Ward Howe. What makes this book particularly satisfying is that Elkins nestles her Laura quite neatly within the actual historical backdrop against which her life took place, and does so without lecturing or losing focus. It helps, of course, that Laura was surrounded by key historical movers and shakers: Samuel Gridley Howe, Julia Ward Howe, and so on. Laura's life is exhilarating, heart-breaking, and tragic by turns. I was shocked and saddened at the way in which she was treated by her benefactor (and her family), but the history Elkins provides helped me understand why he came to see Laura as a "failed experiment." 

I liked this book immensely. It was easy to slip into and hard to leave. One might think an almost 400 page book about a blind/deaf-mute would begin to feel a bit, um, cloistered, but this does not. Four stars and highly recommended to those interested in the Victorian era in America, the life of Laura Bridgman, and the experiences of the blind/deaf.

In other news, Happy Birthday, America! Our imperfect and beautiful land, where so many of us are always striving to create a more perfect Union...Despite all of the disappointments and divisions we have today, I'm happy and proud to have born right here in the good old U S of A.

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