A Nearly Normal Life: A Memoir [Paperback]

Charles L. Mee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 9, 2000 | ISBN-10: 0316558362 | ISBN-13: 978-0316558365

As a fourteen-year-old boy from a small Midwestern town, Charles Mee believed in God, family, and his future, which, at the very least, included girls and a long spell as a hometown football hero. But when he collapsed one night at a school dance, his dreams began to vanish. In a narrative at once funny and profound, Mee brilliantly captures the era in which polio, not communism, was every American parent's nightmare. Unraveling the mysteries of his own Cold War youth, Mee gives voice both to the child with a potentially fatal disease and to the man whose recognition of himself as a disabled outsider has served to heighten his gifts as a storyteller.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"You don't recover from the events of life, you take them with you, you knit them in, you grow with them and around them; they become who you are; they are life itself; how else my life might have been is unknowable." The tone of Mee's memoir of learning to live with polio is an unlikely marriage of elegy and resentment overcome. Well, mostly overcome?and it's the degree to which Mee hasn't completely reconciled himself to the past that gives his book a nostalgia-puncturing edge. A playwright (The Berlin Circle) and historian (Meeting at Potsdam), Mee recalls how his world changed when he was diagnosed with polio. It was 1953, and he was 14. Although Mee recovered and fought to rebuild his damaged body enough to walk with the aid of a cane and a crutch, his carefree days of football and swimming were over. Mee evokes the aggressive optimism of the 1950s, when physicians and nurses staunchly insisted that anyone could recover and refused to acknowledge the despair of the patients in their care. As a result, many polio victims were subjected to useless operations and treatments because their frustrated doctors needed to "do something." Mee also describes the pervading climate of fear that polio triggered among parents and provides an informed account of how the Salk vaccine ended the epidemic. While he acknowledges that society's insistence on recovery and self-reliance did, in fact, play a role in fortifying his will to survive, Mee can't hide a certain bitterness about the emotional cost of keeping a stiff upper lip. His book is better for his honesty. Agent, Lois Wallace.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Playwright and historian Mee (Playing God, S. & S., 1993) explores the many challenges he has faced and successes he can claim as a polio survivor. Beginning with his diagnosis at age 14 and ending with his current struggles with the symptoms of post-polio syndrome, he is always witty and sometimes profound. Mee adds texture and credibility to his already strong writing by judiciously using other sources: personal stories of fellow polio survivors, historical profiles of the 1950s, and histories of the polio virus (including Jane S. Smith's Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine, LJ 4/15/90). Consistently, he refers to his favorite works of scholarship and classical philosophy (particularly the dialogs of Socrates) to illustrate the crucial roles books have played in his "re-birth" and self-discovery after polio. In addition to the importance of reading, the need of those who have had polio to be perceived as "survivors" rather than "victims" and of others to focus on the survivor's abilities rather than on his or her disabilites are major interrelated themes in the book. Recommended for both medical and memoir collections in public libraries?Ximena Chrisagis, Wright State Univ Libs., Dayton, OH
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books (February 9, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316558362
• ISBN-13: 978-0316558365
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,177,199 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A nearly perfect book, March 8, 2000

By 

annulla "annulla" (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Nearly Normal Life: A Memoir (Paperback)

Until his 14th summer, Charles Mee's world seemed safe and unshakable --- secure in a small Midwestern town, surrounded by a loving family, winning praise for his athletic prowess and on the verge of getting his first kiss. And then, suddenly, everything changed. Mee's exposure to the polio virus didn't just infect him --- it profoundly altered his reality, forever changing his perceptions of himself, his family and the way the world works. In this beautiful, heartbreaking tale, Mee poignantly recounts the story of the sick, lonely, frightened child he was and his transformation to the man he is today --- brilliant, creative, funny and "nearly normal."

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Five stars are not enough..., July 10, 2003

By 

michigan jean "jeanps" (MI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Nearly Normal Life: A Memoir (Paperback)

I don't write many reviews anymore, who has time? However, this book stood out so much above the rest I've read lately that I just had to share. The book is about a polio survivor, the 50's, the discovery of the vaccine and oh so much more. It's about living the life you were handed, not the want you thought you were going to get.

His epilogue is pure poetry. An example: "Life continues to change. New things surface; old wounds hidden by bigger wounds show up when the bigger wounds are healed; new clusters of misgivings and confusion take shape to replace old clusters of exhausted adjustments. New things come along to be accepted with grace and peace. The disability and its challenges continue to evolve, and one must achieve acceptance and grace and peace again and again, day after day."

I highly recommend this book to everyone. I read about 5 books a week and this book is in my top 20 of all time.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A personal story attesting to the indomitable human spirit., March 29, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: A Nearly Normal Life (Hardcover)

In the early fifties, polio was every parent's nightmare. Each summer it struck ruthlessly, killing and maiming children without warning. The virus "stripped away from the nerves their myelin sheath, which acts like insulation around an electric cord, so that the nerves short-circuited, sizzled, and died. they stopped sending signals to the muscles, and so the muscles stopped working. Arms and legs lay limp and useless." It was a vastly misunderstood disease which prompted treatments often painful and sometimes bizarre. Patients were covered in hot, wet blankets, stimulated by electric shock, immersed in boiling hot tubs, subjected to experimental surgeries, and imprisoned in iron lung machines. Hospitals sometimes had 60 children in iron lungs at one time jammed into one ward room. Charles Mee's account of the disease which irrevocably altered his life is both intriguing and horrifying, but always inspiring. An athlete as a teenager, he was forced to redefine himself. He emerged from a near-death experience to discover an intellectuality in himself which might never have been realized. The book is a personal story which attests to the indomitable human spirit, but it is also an absorbing account of a gruesome chapter in medical history.