Just after her eleventh birthday, Susan Richards Shreve was sent to the sanitarium at Warm Springs, Georgia. The polio haven, famously founded by FDR, was "a perfect setting in time and place and strangeness for a hospital of crippled children." During Shreve's two year stay, the Salk vaccine would be discovered, ensuring that she would be among the last Americans to have suffered childhood polio.
At Warm Springs, Shreve found herself in a community of similarly afflicted children, and for the first time she was one of the gang. Away from her fiercely protective mother, she became a feisty troublemaker and an outspoken ringleader. Shreve experienced first love with a thirteen-year-old boy in a wheelchair. She navigated rocky friendships, religious questions, and family tensions, and encountered healing of all kinds. Shreve's memoir is both a fascinating historical record of that time and an intensely felt story of childhood.

Author: Susan Richards Shreve
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Published: 06/01/2008
Pages: 224
Weight: 0.5lbs
Size: 8.24h x 5.76w x 0.56d
ISBN: 9780547053837


Review Citation(s):
New York Times Book Review 07/27/2008 pg. 24

About the Author
Shreve, Susan Richards: - Susan Richards Shreve's published novels include A Student of Living Things and Warm Springs. She has worked as a Professor of English at George Mason University and was previously Co-Chair and President of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. She has received several grants for fiction writing, including a Guggenheim fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts award.