Warm Springs

A Book Sense PickJust after her eleventh birthday, Susan Richards Shreve was sent to the sanitarium at Warm Springs, Georgia, the polio haven famously founded by FDR. During Shreve's two-year stay, the Salk vaccine would be discovered, ensuring that she would beamong the last Americans to have suffered childhood polio.Her account of her time there is vividly, endearingly, candidly evoked. At Warm Springs, Shreve found herself in a community of similarly afflicted children-and for the first time, one of the gang. Away from her fiercely protective mother, she became a feisty troublemaker and an outspoken ringleader. In this spirited memoir, Shreve recaptures the joy and agony of awakening to one's potential.

SUSAN RICHARDS SHREVE has published thirteen novels, most recently A Student of Living Things. She is a professor of English at George Mason University and formerly cochair and president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. She has received several grants for fiction writing, including a Guggenheim fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts award. Shreve lives in Washington, D.C.