Lennard Bickel

Triumph Over Darkness (eBook, ePUB)

The Life of Louis Braille

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Born in France in 1809, Louis Braille was the fourth child of a village saddler. At the age of three, he stabbed himself in the eye with a pointed tool taken from his father's work bench.
Some thirteen years later he again took a sharp tool from the same bench and used it to create a code of raised dots punched through sheets of paper. With the patience of genius, he perfected his code - still unsurpassed - and fashioned an alphabet that opened the world of learning to the blind.

Louis Braille died at the age of forty-three, unknown and unhonoured. His superiors at the Royal Institute for the Young Blind in Paris would not recognise a system that was not based on the shapes of the alphabet.

Lennard Bickel researched this story in Paris and in the small village where Louis Braille was born. He tells of the trials and torments of young blind man struggling amid the harshest conditions to perfect something he believed in.

Triumph Over Darkness, first published in 1988, is a stirring story of determination and tenacity in the face of adversity.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury UK eBooks
• Erscheinungstermin: 27. Januar 2015
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781448214853
• Artikelnr.: 42008778

Autorenporträt

Lennard Bickel (1913-2002) was a science writer for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in the 1960s. He was the only Australian journalist invited to witness the 1969 Apollo II moon landing from the launch site.

In 1970, Bickel was awarded a Commonwealth Literary Fellowship in order to write Rise Up To Life, a biography of Howard Florey, who pioneered the development of penicillin. He subsequently wrote a number of other books that highlight remarkable human achievement: little-known epics of triumph over diversity, including This Accursed Land (1977), about Douglas Mawson's struggle to stay alive in the Antarctic, and Triumph Over Darkness: The Life of Louis Braille (1988).

In 1974 he was made a Knight of the Order of Mark Twain for his biography of Norman Borlaug, the Nobel-winning humanitarian scientist.

Inhaltsangabe

List of Illustrations Tribute, by the Late Helen Adams Keller 1. The First
Step 2. The Blinded Child 3. Shadow of a Saint 4. The Domino Six 5. The
Last Radiance 6. Postscript 7. The Braille Benefaction Acknowledgements
Chronology Sources and Notes Index