Descrição
Polio, the A-Bomb and Me is the poignant, often hilarious account, of a polio survivor growing up in rural America in the fifties and sixties. When polio strikes Paula Viale at the age of six weeks, doctors tell her parents that if she lives, she will never sit up or walk. But with naive determination, the little girl manages to face and overcome her physical challenges with creativity, stubbornness and a burning desire to live in the world of normalcy.This is a first-hand account of growing up with severe handicaps in the decades before the enlightenment of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The memoir describes the stresses on Viale’s parents who, already mourning the loss of one child, struggle to marshal limited resources to give their daughter an authentic childhood and education. It is also the story of how that girl, instilled with quick wit and “gumption”, survives a sterile medical system that forces mothers and fathers to hand over their parental rights to doctors and a medical establishment that insists it knows what is best for their child. Paula’s descriptions of times spent in a hospital known to social workers of the forties as Stalag 19 are told with a mix of childish levity and heart-breaking frankness.Imaginative and sometimes morbidly curious, Paula propels herself through childhood, often wounded, but rarely defeated by physical and emotional hardships. Unlike many disabled children, she is accepted by the neighborhood gang and “mainstreamed” using her brother’s Radio Flyer red wagon and a specially adapted tricycle designed by her father. Her conventional childhood adventures will ring true to many of the baby-boomers who remember idyllic weekends and long summer days of unstructured, unsupervised play in the years following WWII. Polio, the A-Bomb and Me is more than a coming-of-age memoir. It is a coming to terms with the pain of being different and how that pain creates a strong sense of self. When, as a teenager, life becomes much more socially challenging, Paula gives up on being one of the crowd, deciding instead to be one of a kind.This wonderfully crafted memoir contains laugh-aloud humor as well as an unflinching look back at the challenges, and sometimes horrors, of living with polio in the age of Eisenhower and Gunsmoke.
