BookBrowse Reviews Warm Springs: A rich and moving memoir of childhood illness and its aftermath by a member of the last generation of Americans to have experienced childhood polio

Shreve, who contracted polio when she was a year-old, spent the first 11 years of her life trying to fit into "normal" life, walking with a brace and failing deportment classes at the local elementary school. So she was thrilled to arrive at a place where crippled children were considered ordinary - only to find herself insufficiently debilitated to be considered normal there either!

For many decades after Shreve's father collected her from Warm Springs, having been ask to remove his 13-year-old daughter with immediate effect as she was a "danger" to the other children, Shreve never thought to look back on her time at the center. This changed a few years ago when she and her husband struck up a conversation with two scientists who...