The Broken Boy [Import] [Paperback]

Patrick Cockburn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 25, 2006

A personal memoir of the last great polio epidemic, affecting 50,000 people, and of the author’s own experience of polio; a portrait of his parents, both radicals; and the story of the epidemic in Cork, Ireland, where the author and his family lived in the mid 1950s.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Patrick Cockburn writes on foreign affairs for the Independent. His previous books are Getting Russia Wrong and Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Vintage Books (July 25, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 009945923X
• ISBN-13: 978-0099459231
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.8 x 7.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,174,091 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Polio in Cork, December 3, 2006

By 

Mschwindt (Washington state) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Broken Boy (Paperback)

The author, who contracted polio at age six, was one of many victims of the polio epidemic in Cork,

Ireland. Over 50,000 got the virus in 1956, "one of the last great outbreaks of

polio anywhere in Western Europe." An outbreak that occurred just a few years

after a vaccine had been developed in America.

The book is interesting when it describes the way that the community denied

and downplayed the effects of epidemic. Newspapers, then still the main source

of information in Ireland, never named polio victims and only published, more or

less uncritically, official reports on the epidemic. This, and apparently, the

desire of the business community to maintain economic stability in the

community, created an environment of incoherent hysteria where children

were kept home from school and public swimming pools closed, but pubs

remained opened.

Patrick Cockburn, a distinguished international news correspondent, was

gravely affected by the disease. Today, he walks with a limp, cannot run or

drive a car. He tells quite a bit of his days in hospital and feelings at the time.

He seems, though, a bit reticent about it at times, because it was so long ago and also

perhaps because of a resentment at his parents moving house to Cork, despite

warnings about the epidemic.

His parents were Claud and Patricia Cockburn. His father was a leftist writer

and his mother a daughter of Anglo-Irish upper-class parents. Both were

adventurous and neither were accustomed to changing their plans if risks were

involved. Much of the book, perhaps too much, is written about his parents and

their background. For those readers of Alexander Cockburn, Patrick's brother,

this family background is very familiar ground.

Well-written and interesting in places, this is a slight contribution to the

literature on diseases and epidemics. Cockburn laments the lack of information

on polio epidemic in Cork, so perhaps this is spadework for another, larger

book. For those who are interested in epidemics in general, Cockburn points to

a classic account, Journal of a Plague Year by Daniel Defoe.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Polio, January 17, 2007

By 

T. Porges (Washington DC, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Broken Boy (Paperback)

I had polio, about the same in immediate and long-term effect as Cockburn, at about the same time. The reason for the reticence the earlier reviewer notes is that at that time we were all bombarded by images of kids in iron lungs, and by encouraging stories about other little boys and girls who'd had polio or other crippling diseases and accidents (the miler Glenn Cunningham was a teacher favorite) and who'd gone on to greatness of one kind or another.

Part of that message was that if we weren't going to be cheerful overachievers we should at least have the grace to shut up about it, since so many others (the coffin kids) had it so much worse. To be a polio survivor is to know absolutely that whatever you may think you deserve, there's another kid in the ward who deserves much more; however great you think you are there's another kid who's better. It screws me up at job interviews but otherwise makes me a better person than I might otherwise be -- though not, as noted, as good as Patrick Cockburn, most likely.

This is a good book. A nice comparison read would be Wilfrid Sheed's _People Will Always Be Kind_.