Warm Springs

More than a revealing picture of FDR's polio treatment center in the years just before the arrival of vaccines that ended a frightening, crippling disease, this is a moving portrait of a girl on the cusp of adolescence dealing with pain, guilt and loneliness.

The writing of this beautifully told story is delicate and precise

With her novelist's gift for scene and dialogue, Shreve recreates the lost world of Warm Spring, GA, where, as a child, she created a community unique in its particulars but universal in its intensity.

What happens when a fleet and willing--willful--spirit finds herself with a body inadequate to her energy and ambition? In the case of Susan Richard Shreve, a writer was born. One of the last generation of Americans to suffer polio, Shreve reveals how inextricably entwined are our strengths and weaknesses, and that freedom can be as much a state of mind as of circumstance. A lovely book, by a passionate and gallant human being.

In this harrowing, heartbreaking memoir, Susan Shreve takes us into a Dickensian world of lost children, only it is all too real. With its poignant cast of unforgetable characters, not to mention the feisty narrator herself, we are taken back into a moment of history where polios were our pariahs and children lived, hoping to walk again, at Warm Springs. But what makes this memoir so extraordinary is Susan Shreve herself whose escapades and tenderness touch and move the reader to laughter and tears and whose courage astounds us. This is a world you cannot know unless you have lived inside of it and Susan Shreve has and so will her readers.

Susan Shreve’s WARM SPRINGS is a gem of a book— an elegantly written, achingly powerful memoir of childhood illness in the terrifying era of polio. Shreve is more than a storyteller; she’s a master at combining history and remembrance in ways that make her characters come alive. Three words best describe WARM SPRINGS: riveting, honest, unforgettable.