Out of Darkness: The Story of Louis Braille - Hardcover

Freedman, Russell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395775167 ISBN 13: 9780395775165

Publisher: Clarion Books, 1997

Synopsis

A biography of the modest Frenchman who, after being blinded at the age of three, went on to develop a system of raised dots on paper that enabled blind people to read and write.

About this title

About the Author:

RUSSELL FREEDMAN received the Newbery Medal for Lincoln: A Photobiography. He is also the recipient of three Newbery Honors, a National Humanities Medal, the Sibert Medal, the Orbis Pictus Award, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, and was selected to give the 2006 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture. Mr. Freedman lives in New York City and travels widely to research his books.

From Booklist:

Gr. 4^-8. More than 170 years ago, a blind French boy at age 15 invented a system of raised dots on paper that allows the sightless to read and write. Without melodrama, Freedman tells the momentous story in quiet chapters in his best plain style, making the facts immediate and personal. At age 3, Louis Braille was blinded in an accident with a knife. From the age of 12, he worked doggedly, sometimes secretly through the night at a special school in Paris, punching dots on paper, trying to develop a simple code for the alphabet that the blind could read with their fingertips. Woven into the story is an awareness of how the blind child experiences the world, what he remembers. Tension mounts as he refuses to be discouraged by technical and bureaucratic setbacks, until eventually he proves his system to his school and finally to the world. The handsome book design is clear and open. A diagram explains how the Braille alphabet works, and Kate Kessler's full-page shaded pencil illustrations are part of the understated poignant drama. But what about documentation? Is the opening chapter partially fictionalized? No sources are given for the facts and quotes throughout the book, and there's no bibliography. Hazel Rochman

About this edition

• Publisher: Clarion Books
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0395775167
• ISBN 13: 9780395775165
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96
• Illustrator: Kiesler Kate