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Traces of a Childhood at FDR's Polio Haven
by Susan Richards Shreve
Book Reviewed by:A rich and moving memoir of childhood illness and its aftermath by a member of the last generation of Americans to have experienced childhood polio.
Just after her eleventh birthday, at the height of the frightening childhood polio epidemic, Susan Richards Shreve was sent as a patient to the sanitarium at Warm Springs, Georgia. It was a place famously founded by FDR, "a perfect setting in time and place and strangeness for a hospital of crippled children."
There the young Shreve met Joey Buckley, a thirteen-year-old in a wheelchair who desperately wants to play football for Alabama. The shock of first love and of separation from her fiercely protective mother propels Shreve on a careening course from Warm Springs bad girl to overachieving saint and back again. This indelible portrait of the psychic fallout of childhood illness ends -- like Tobias Wolff's Old School -- with a shocking collision between adolescent drive and genteel institution.
During Shreve's stay at Warm Springs, the Salk vaccine was developed, an event that put an end to a harrowing time for American families. Shreve's memoir is both a fascinating historical record of that time and an intensely felt story of childhood.
Traces
I’m sitting with my legs straight out on an examining table at the Georgia
Warm Springs Polio Foundation, where I have just arrived. Four doctors lean
over my legs, their elbows on the table, talking back and forth. The doctors
are looking for traces.
Traces are little whispers of life in muscles destroyed by the polio
virus. They promise the possibility of a new future. My part in this
examination, not the first in my life with polio, is to concentrate with all my
might on each muscle, one at a time, in the hope that with my undivided
attention, there will be a shiver of response and the doctors will rise up,
smiling, and announce that the audition has been a success and there is
reason for hope.
Muscle to muscle, trace to trace, I am looking for a sign of
possibility.
At Warm Springs, traces is the word for hope.
When I think of the word “traces” now, it is as a footprint or a
shadow or a verb, like “unearth” or “...
A riveting, raw, miscellany of memories from a bygone era that seems much longer ago than it is - a snapshot of a time and place, and the challenge of living with pain, guilt and loneliness...continued
Full Review
(715 words)
(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Kathryn Harrison author of The Kiss and The Mother Knot
What happens when a fleet and willing - willful - spirit finds herself with a body inadequate to her energy and ambition? In the case of Susan Richard Shreve, a writer was born. One of the last generation of Americans to suffer polio, Shreve reveals how inextricably entwined are our strengths and weaknesses, and that freedom can be as much a state of mind as of circumstance. A lovely book, by a passionate and gallant human being. David Oshinksy, author of Polio: An American Story
Susan Shreve's Warm Springs is a gem of a book— an elegantly
written, achingly powerful memoir of childhood illness in the terrifying
era of polio. Shreve is more than a storyteller; she’s a master at
combining history and remembrance in ways that make her characters come
alive. Three words best describe Warm Springs: riveting, honest,
unforgettable.Poliomyelitis, more commonly known as Polio, is a viral disease that has plagued humans since ancient times. It is transmitted primarily through direct fecal-oral contact. However, it can also be transmitted by indirect contact with infectious saliva or feces or by contaminated sewage or water.
In over 90% of cases there are no symptoms but in those who show symptoms the illness takes three forms: Abortive polio in which people experience mild flu-like symptoms; a more serious form called nonparalytic polio in which a person experiences sensitivity to light and neck stiffness; and then there is the severe, debilitating form known as paralytic polio in which the virus leaves the intestinal tract and enters the bloodstream, attacking the ...
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