Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR's Polio Haven [Bargain Price] [Paperback]

Susan Richards Shreve (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 10, 2008

Just after her eleventh birthday, Susan Richards Shreve was sent to the sanitarium at Warm Springs, Georgia. The polio haven, famously founded by FDR, was “a perfect setting in time and place and strangeness for a hospital of crippled children.” During Shreve’s two year stay, the Salk vaccine would be discovered, ensuring that she would be among the last Americans to have suffered childhood polio.
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 fiercely protective mother, she became a feisty troublemaker and an outspoken ringleader. Shreve experienced first love with a thirteen-year-old boy in a wheelchair. She navigated rocky friendships, religious questions, and family tensions, and encountered healing of all kinds. Shreve’s memoir is both a fascinating historical record of that time and an intensely felt story of childhood.

Editorial Reviews

From 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." (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

It's hard to tell whether Shreve's affecting book on her two years at the Warm Springs Polio Foundation is more memoir of adolescence or agonizing confession. But no matter. What is clear is that, when she entered the facility at age 11, she got off to a running start at teenage rebellion. From developing a prohibited friendship with the daughter of a black cleaning woman to sneaking into the boys' wing to, finally, the stunt that triggered her swift removal from Warm Springs, Shreve proved that a wheelchair was no hindrance to preadolescent high jinks. Despite her precipitous departure, she maintains vivid and mostly fond memories of the place and, especially, of partner-in-crime Joey Buckley and of Father James, on whom she developed a serious crush. Her recollections of the period, the facility, and its staff evoke a time when the U.S. was desperate for solutions to the raging polio pandemic. An appealing memoir and a significant snapshot of an era. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; Reprint edition (June 10, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0547053835
• ASIN: B003YCQGJA
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #895,551 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Read for pleasure, but also had a life lesson June 12, 2007

By Mona L. Roth

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I had no interest in Polio, or FDR. I just read the book because it was recommended, and boy, I was glad that I did. I learned about the dreadful disease, the hardships of FDR, and the outlook of one amazing girl, Susan.

Just why do some have to suffer like she did? And why do those that have to undertake such an ordeal have such a positive attitude? I think about the book often, and share my new knowledge to anyone that will listen.

Enjoy.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing premise, yet falls flat November 6, 2008

By Joanna Mechlinski VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

In the 1940s and early 1950s, polio epidemics spread across the United States, severely damaging the health -- and overall lives -- of many individuals, mainly children. Susan Richards, who'd been struck by the virus as a baby, was one.

At age eleven, Susan was sent to Warm Springs, a Georgia hospital and research facility where she would live among other polio patients for nearly two years. During this time, she underwent numerous painful operations as doctors struggled to help her walk and overall improve the quality of her life.

In her memoir, Shreve recalls her experiences at Warm Springs -- other children she befriended, the young priest on whom she developed a crush, her feelings of guilt over having "caused so much trouble" for her family.

While her anecdotes are overall frank and promising, the author unfortunately tends to go around in circles without much of a plot. Too many pages to count are consumed by Susan's endless jaunts throughout the hospital grounds, not really culminating in anything in particular. Frequently she sets up an element -- such as her younger brother's issues with the lifelong disruption of his nuclear family -- but fails to take it anywhere. Other times, she abruptly switches from her adolescent self to a voice clearly grown, using phrases referring to her marriage and children. This is both jarring and, again, refers to things that are never actually explained in any significant detail.

Finally, the author relies quite heavily upon the fact that Roosevelt, also a polio victim, had once stayed at Warm Springs and essentially ensured the facility's existence. Readers might appreciate a bit of background about the former president in order to gain more context about the illness and Warm Springs itself, but Shreve uses a significant chunk of her book talking about the life of Roosevelt -- giving the distinct impression of unsuccessfully searching for filler material.

If I wanted a biography of Roosevelt, I would have sought one...

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Heartfelt June 8, 2007

By James Hiller TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Yesterday, after listening to Susan Shreve speak on NPR's Talk of the Nation, I immediately ran out to get a copy of her new book, "Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR's Polio Haven". A longtime "history buff" of FDR, and of particular interest in the history of Warm Springs, I hoped that Shreve's memoir would add to my knowledge of the camp through the eyes of her own experience. What I found was a deeping moving story of a girl, struggling with her condition, all the while learning about others, which in turn, she learns about herself.

Susan Shreve was diagnosed with polio at quite a young age. She is moved to Warm Springs at the tender age of 11, in which her hijinx ensues. What comes across in the book quite quickly that dear young Susan is quite an imp, impressionable, and very much a part of the scene. She engages in several adventures that had me laughing outloud, and some that were serious and reflective.

Shreve manages, in like so many memoirs, to recover a time and a place that has long since passed, but to do so in such eloquence that I found myself reading and rereading pages and paragraphs from their simple beauty of words.

To wit: "Muscle to muscle, trace to trace, I am looking for a sign of possibility. At Warm Springs, traces is the word for hope. When I think of the word "traces" now, it is as a footprint or a shadow or a verb, like "unearth" or "expose" or "reveal." I've been looking for traces in my childhood that will bring the years I spent in Warm Springs into some kind of focus. In its intention, the process is very much the same as it was when I lived there and turned my attention to discovering what remained."

The sheer elegance of her writing is precious, exact. It is reminscient of the cleverness of Michael Cunningham, or the beauty of Grief by Andrew Holleran. In a couple of months, perhaps in the midst of summer, I may revisit this book, and spend time again at Warm Springs, just to bask in the glow of her words.

This would be an excellent book for any reading group, a gift for a mother or sister, or someone facing a time of trial in their lives. Thanks to Susan Sherve for crafting such an excellent portrait of her times at Warm Springs!