More than a revealing picture of FDR’s polio treatment center in the years just before the arrival of vaccines that ended a...
Memoir of life at Roosevelt’s Warm Springs polio center, where the author stayed between the ages of 11 and 13.
Novelist Shreve (A Student of Living Things, 2006, etc.) draws on an unpublished novel, written when she was 18, to refresh her memory of life at that time. Her initial stay was from August to December 1950, with a second and longer stay from June 1951 to April 1952. During both stays, surgery is performed on her right leg and she undergoes months of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation for her is not simply a physical act; she believes that at Warm Springs she will transform herself from a bad girl who had caused her family trouble into a virtual angel of God. Less severely handicapped than most of the other children—her roommate is in a body cast—the lonely young Shreve is embarrassed by her relative wholeness and feels very much the outsider. She tries to fill her days with catechism lessons from a friendly priest, reading books and becoming a sort of caretaker, visiting the babies’ ward every day, delivering mail and carrying bedpans. She writes falsely cheery letters to her mother, to which her mother offers upbeat replies, neither one acknowledging true feelings and the reality of the situation. Her special friend is a half-paralyzed boy, Joey, who dreams of becoming an athlete and whom Shreve recklessly leads into a terrible accident, the story of which begins and ends this memoir. Having tried to become the epitome of goodness, she commits a reckless act that confirms her badness and swiftly brings about her departure, if not expulsion, from 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.Pub Date: June 7, 2007
ISBN: 0-618-65853-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
