Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Warm Springs : traces of a childhood at FDR's polio haven

Author: Shreve, Susan Richards.
Publisher description
Sample text
Contributor biographical information
Publication info: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 2007.
ISBN: 9780618658534
ISBN: 061865853X
Description: viii, 215 p. ; ill. ; 22 cm.

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 overachieving saint. This portrait of the psychic fallout of childhood illness ends with a shocking collision between adolescent drive and genteel institution. During Shreve's stay at Warm Springs, the Salk vaccine was discovered; Shreve is one of the last generation of Americans to have survived childhood polio.--From publisher description.

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