Warm Springs
Traces of a Childhood at FDR's Polio Haven
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An “engrossing” memoir of finding comfort, company—and mischief—at the famed Georgia retreat for children with polio (Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air).
Just after her eleventh birthday, Susan Richards Shreve was sent to the Polio Foundation in Warm Springs, Georgia. Famously founded by Franklin Delano Roosevelt after he was disabled by the disease himself, the haven would be her home, off and on, for the next two years. In this piercingly honest memoir, Shreve recaptures her early adolescence, as well as an era of American life gripped by a fearful epidemic.
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 protective mother, she became a feisty troublemaker and an outspoken ringleader. She navigated first love, rocky friendships, religious questions, and family tensions—and experienced healing of all kinds. During her stay, the Salk vaccine would be discovered, ensuring that Shreve would be among the last Americans to have suffered childhood polio.
“This sensitive, beautifully written memoir can stand on its own as a glimpse into an era of suffering, and as a testimony to the human spirit.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Shreve succeeds at the difficult task of recapturing, and communicating, what it was like to be young.” —People
“Part memoir, part confession, part mediation on both polio and the president who made it a national cause, Warm Springs unflinchingly illuminates an iconic moment in American history.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Shreve recollects her years spent from ages 11 to 13 at Warm Springs Polio Foundation in Georgia: "Traces are little whispers of life in muscles destroyed by the polio virus." The traces of this eloquently written memoir, however, are not merely physical; they are the whispers of the time, brief glimpses into the social climate of the 1950s, into the religious longing of a lonely young girl hoping for a connection, into the mindset of the president who led the country despite a debilitating handicap. While the events take place as Shreve recovers from surgeries that would allow her to walk better, polio becomes a minor character; her friendships with the others in the facility, her innocent romance with a fellow patient and her growing attraction to the priest take center stage as she tries to make herself into a "good" girl: "I remember reading once," she writes, "about the strange attractor, a star that unsettles planetary balance, which was the role I seemed to play in our family life." The writing of this beautifully told story is delicate and precise, even as she calls into question her own memories: "we lived in a kind of maze, a finely spun fairy tale created by my parents in which some things were clear and some were fuzzy.... I assumed that what I saw was true. I didn't realize until I was older that seeing is a matter of choice."
