Miss Spitfire - Sarah Miller

Miss Spitfire: reaching Helen Keller - Miller, Sarah

Summary: At age twenty-one, partially-blind, lonely but spirited Annie Sullivan travels from Massachusetts to Alabama to try and teach six-year-old Helen Keller, deaf and blind since age two, self-discipline and communication skills. Includes historical notes and timeline.

Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Miller's accomplished debut imagines Annie Sullivan's first experiences with her famous pupil, Helen Keller, from the young teacher's train ride to Alabama, during which she anticipated teaching a charge who had "no words, only sensations," to the breakthrough at the water pump, where she taught Helen to use language. Miller based her story on Sullivan's letters, excerpts of which begin each chapter, and in Sullivan's voice, Miller muses about the monumental questions and challenges that she faced: "It's up to me to show Helen that communication between people exists at all." Many lengthy passages detailing the wild, messy intimacy and the violent physical altercations between Sullivan and young Helen may tire some readers, but they amplify the visceral sense of Sullivan's exhausting struggle. In language that often reads like poetry, Miller creates a strong portrait of Sullivan's accomplishments, as well as her character—volatile, ferociously intelligent, and yearning for love and belonging, just like Helen. "Words bridge the gaps between two minds. Words are a miracle," Sullivan says. Miller's words reach beyond the historical facts here, encouraging readers to think about the small miracles of connection they can accomplish with words every day. Photos, a chronology, and an extensive bibliography conclude this stirring, fictionalized account.

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All over but the shoutin' - Rick Bragg

All over but the shoutin' - Bragg, Rick

Summary: This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. It is the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the habit of running out on the people who needed him most. But at the center of this soaring memoir is Bragg's mother, who went eighteen years without a new dress so that her sons could have school clothes and picked other people's cotton so that her children wouldn't have to live on welfare alone. Evoking these lives--and the country that shaped and nourished them--with artistry, honesty, and compassion, Rick Bragg brings home the love and suffering that lie at the heart of every family. The result is unforgettable.

Booklist Reviews
Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize^-winning national correspondent for the New York Times, relates a rags-to-riches tale that begins in George Wallace's Alabama. Abandoned by her husband, Bragg's mother was left to raise three sons on her own. They were dirt poor, but Bragg remembers childhood as being "sweet and warm," thanks largely to his mother, a woman whose courage never failed. After just six months of college, Bragg started his career as a sportswriter for small-town papers in Alabama, eventually making his way to reporting news for the St. Petersburg Times. An application for a Nieman Fellowship took him to Harvard, where the interview panel wanted to know if his country boy image was "just a gimmick." But it was that distinctive southern voice that led eventually to the New York Times job. Bragg never forgets what he owes to his mother, and the book's climax is the Pulitzer Prize award ceremony, which his mother attended, having taken her first ride on an airplane and her first ride on an elevator to get there. ((Reviewed September 15, 1997)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews


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