You’ve heard of Helen Keller, of course, but who came before her?

This past March, a previously unknown, 130-year-old photo of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy made front-page news. I stared at the photo in wonder: How many people, dead for decades, still attract our fascination? “Certainly Helen Keller makes the cut,” I told myself. Fortunately, a recent burst of books on Helen, and on women like her, attest to that fact. And all make for captivating booktalks.

Start with Emily Arnold McCully’s lovely My Heart Glow: Alice Cogswell, Thomas Gallaudet, and the Birth of American Sign Language (Hyperion, 2008, Gr 2–5). When Alice Cogswell was only two, a bout of spotted fever left her deaf and unable to speak. To outward appearances she was normal; inwardly, she was alone, shut off from the world. Then, in 1814, her neighbor, Thomas Gallaudet, began teaching her to read. And he didn’t stop there: Alice’s father paid for Gallaudet to travel abroad and learn a new European invention. When Gallaudet returned to share his knowledge, American Sign Language was born.

Three decades later, in 1841, Laura Bridgman became the most famous child in the world. “Like all children, you would have loved and admired her,” writes author Sally Hobart Alexander. “You would have named your favorite doll after her. And then you would have poked out the doll’s eyes.” Alexander, who is herself blind and partially deaf, tells us Laura’s astounding story in She Touched the World: Laura Bridgman, Deaf-Blind Pioneer (Clarion, 2008, Gr 4–9).

Like Alice Cogswell, Laura, though deaf and blind, saw her life change dramatically when a college student brought her to the attention of someone making change. For Laura, that someone was Samuel Gridley Howe, head of the New England Institution for the Education of the Blind—America’s first school for blind children.

Show your booktalk audience the photographs of Laura, pointing out how her eyes were covered with a ribbon, because blind eyes were considered unattractive. What’s important is that Laura was teachable. The world followed her progress, stunned by her achievements. Laura even taught Anne Sullivan, who herself was almost blind throughout childhood, how to fingerspell. Sullivan went on to teach another special student, Helen Keller, who had been lost in her own isolation until she met Annie. Marfé Ferguson Delano shares their story in Helen’s Eyes: A Photobiography of Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller’s Teacher (National Geographic, 2008, Gr 4–8).

Sullivan met Helen after graduating from the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston. Having brought her own vision problems under control with surgery, Annie took a job in Alabama with the Keller family. Little did she know she would take part in one of history’s real-life miracles. For Helen could not see or hear or speak. Teaching her was an overwhelming challenge.

Reading about the day that Annie taught Helen to understand that things had names sends chills up the spine. The whole world flooded into Helen’s eager mind. She wanted to learn the names of everything—and throughout the rest of Annie’s life, she helped Helen do just that.

This was a teacher who had survived a horrible childhood, growing up in an orphanage where she often slept in the “dead” room, where corpses were stored. (Ask your booktalk audience to imagine that!) As for Helen herself, George Sullivan’s Helen Keller, Her Life in Pictures (Scholastic, 2007, Gr 3–8) offers a fresh, inspiring look at the woman we can’t learn enough about.

When Annie finger-spelled words she’d learned from Laura Bridgman into Helen’s hand, history and meaning passed from one woman to another—to another. Small wonder that Keller’s life story moves us so. Yet all four women deserve a place in the light. And these books help, offering young readers an introduction to some of America’s most fascinating, courageous women.