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Traces of a Childhood at FDR's Polio Haven
Houghton Mifflin
June 2006
On Sale: June 7, 2006
224 pages
ISBN: 061865853X
EAN: 9780618658534
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
Just after her eleventh birthday in 1950 and at the height
of the frightening childhood polio epidemic, Susan Richards
Shreve was sent 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 meets Joey Buckley,
paralyzed from the waist down and determined to leave Warm
Springs able to play football. The dual shocks of first love
and separation from her fiercely protective mother propel
Shreve careening between bad girl rebellion to
over-achieving saint. 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.
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