Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Teaser ~ a memoir I recommend

Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio ~ by Peg Kehret, 1996, memoir, 9.5/10
"Why were you out of bed?" ...
"I was doing the hula," I said. ...
"The hula?"
"Alice didn't know what the hula is," explained Renée.
"So Peg was going to show her," Dorothy added.
Shaking her head in disbelief, Willie helped me into bed and warned me to stay there.  "In all my years of nursing," she said, "I've never had a polio patient try to dance the hula" (p. 102).

Peg Schulze became Peg Kehret when I married Carl Kehret.  We have two children, Anne and Bob, and I wept for joy the day they got their first polio vaccinations" (p. 172).
I saw this on Donna's shelf, borrowed it, read it straight through in one sitting, and have already returned it to Donna.  Here's what the book is about:
In a riveting story of courage and hope, Peg Kehret writes about months spent in a hospital when she was twelve, first struggling to survive a severe case of polio, then slowly learning to walk again.

1 comment:

Deb Nance at Readerbuzz said...

This is a wonderful book. I remember reading it long ago. No child today in America can know what it was like to live with the fear of getting polio.