Warm Springs

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 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. During Shreve's stay at Warm Springs, the Salk vaccine was discovered; Shreve is now among the last Americans to have survived childhood polio. Her memoir is both a fascinating historic record and an intensely felt story of childhood.