The World I Live in - Softcover

Keller, Helen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1438528132 ISBN 13: 9781438528137

Publisher: Book Jungle, 2009

Synopsis

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE HAND OF THE RACE E)K in your "Century Dictionary," or if you are blind, ask your teacher to do it for you, and learn how many idioms are made on the idea of hand, and how many words are formed from the Latin root manus?enough words to name all the essential affairs of life. "Hand," with quotations and compounds, occupies twenty-four columns, eight pages of this dictionary. The hand is defined as "the organ of apprehension." How perfectly the definition fits my case in both senses of the word "apprehend"! With my hand I seize and hold all that I find in the three V/.v-'-A worlds?physical, intellectual, and spir- aL. - Think how man has regarded the world in terms of the hand. All life is divided between what lies on one hand and on the other. The products of skill are manufactures. The conduct of affairs is management. History seems to be the record?alas for our chronicles of war!?of the maneuvers of armies. But the history of peace, too, the narrative of labor in the field, the forest, and the vineyard, is written in the victorious sign manual?the sign of the hand that has conquered the wilderness. The laborer himself is called a hand. In manacle and manumission we read the story of human slavery and freedom. The minor idioms are myriad; but I will not recall too many, lest you cry, "Hands off!" I cannot desist, however, from this word-game until I have set down a few. Whatever is not one's own by first possession is second-hand. That is what I am told my knowledge is. But my well-meaning friends come to., y o'efe'nsei'andj not consent with endowing mewith natural first-hand knowledge wKicITIsi rTghTfully mine, ascribe to me a preternatural sixth sense and credit to miracles and heaven-sent compensations all that I have won and discovered with my go...

About this title

About the Author

Helen Keller is Professor of Constitutional, European and Public International Law at the University of Zurich. She served as a member of the UN Human Rights Committee from 2008 until 2011, when she was elected as a judge at the European Court of Human Rights.

Review

"Roger Shattuck’s striking new edition of The World I Live In, a sparkling work too long obscured, renews Helen Keller for all generations—for the steadfast admirers of her art, and particularly for readers not yet acquainted with the sightless genius who taught the world the majesty of her insight. The World I Live In brings us intimately close, in her own valiant words, to the mind of a woman for whom language was life."
— Cynthia Ozick

"While Helen Keller is better known for The Story of My Life, her later book, The World I Live In, is a warmer, more intimate and more beautiful work, one in which we encounter Helen Keller’s remarkable imagination, her originality, and her power as a literary artist. She comes alive here, vividly and idiosyncratically, more than in any other of her writings."
— Oliver Sacks

"An astounding account, enhanced further by Roger Shattuck’s excellent introduction in which he explores the implications of her experience."
— The Observer

"An affirmation of the fact that real miracles are the product of human endeavour and inspiration"
— Times Educational Supplement (London)

About this edition

• Publisher: Book Jungle
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1438528132
• ISBN 13: 9781438528137
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 102