
Purchase
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
Add to Wish List
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, βa perfect setting in time and place and strangeness for a hospital of crippled children.β 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 endsβlike Tobias Wolffβs Old Schoolβwith a shocking collision between adolescent drive and genteel institution.
 Media BuzzNewsHour with Jim Lehrer - July 31, 2007 Talk of the Nation - June 6, 2007
|