62 books like Polio

Barry’s dramatic historical account of the 1918 influenza pandemic has been called “fascinating,” “brilliant,” “sobering,” and “terrifying” by numerous reviewers.

It is a piece of history, the worst public health disaster in the century before COVID-19, that should have helped succeeding generations to take pandemic preparedness more seriously. It should have enhanced our understanding that during such a crisis, science must lead the way. Despite all that we did learn from the great influenza of 1918, we were unable to avoid many of the mistakes made when our leaders too often shunned the advice of science and made the COVID-19 pandemic political.

This book informed and influenced me greatly. It inspired me to see the need for and the importance of recording and learning from our experiences a century later.

As a historian, some books just keep coming back to you. McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples is just such a book. 

He is really the first historian to outline the dramatic impact that infectious diseases have had on human history. He outlines the spread of smallpox, diphtheria, Yellow Fever, Malaria, the Plague, and many others, as they originate mostly in Africa and come into the Mediterranean Ocean, to produce cycles of death. 

But the people who lived on the edge of that ocean soon came to develop antibodies, and ultimately, master the impact of such terrible diseases.  

Unfortunately, those diseases were soon transferred to the Americas, where perhaps a hundred million American Indians died from them. They had no immunities!

Had such a calamity not occurred, the two western hemispheric continents might easily be dominated by Natives, who spoke a different language and prayed to a different God.

This book characterizes the discovery and spread HIV and AIDS. Shits an investigative journalist provides an extensive look into the disease itself, the politics and politicians battling to control or ignoring the disease. Also discussed are the events that shaped the pandemic leading to its expansion or its control. 

This book provides an intimate portrait of outbreaks of Ebola, the world’s most fearsome and deadly virus, and reveals how the result of that experience provides information to help fight Covid-19. Introduced are people who fought heroically with limited resources, including  Sheik Kahn who died fighting Ebola as it spread as a tsunami, Pardis Sabeti a geneticist named “scientist of the year” by Time magazine and Robert Garry who led the fight against viral hemorrhagic diseases. Sabeti and Garry worked with the authors and provide a personal narrative of the involved events.

This fantastic biography recounts one of the greatest rivalries in medical history during the race for the polio vaccine, which pitted Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin against each other.

Salk favored a killed-virus approach, which was easier but perhaps less protective and long lasting. Sabin preferred an attenuated-virus method that was more difficult to make but could be life-long and delivered orally rather than by serial injections.

Salk’s vaccine arrived first and saved thousands of lives, but Sabin still publicly criticized it, even in testimony to Congress. Sabin’s vaccine later became favored, but the debate about whose was superior persisted and continued long after each man’s death.

Carter’s superb narrative benefited from his weeks-long interviews with Salk, and interviews with other major figures in the effort to defeat polio.

Peg Kehret brings humor and a genuine can-do attitude to her memoir about being struck by polio when she was twelve years old, leaving her paralyzed in both her arms and legs. The story of her fight to recover and to walk again is enriched by her friendship with fellow patients, the generous love of her family, and the care of a determined nurse. Peg is neither saint nor grouch—just someone you like as much as you admire. This is a feel-good book about a feel-bad topic. 

I laughed out loud reading The Remember Box. Though the story is serious, Sprinkle captured the concerns and problem-solving that 11-year-old girls have in a time in history, 1949, when life in the South was confusing for those families who took a stand against prejudice.

The author sprinkles Carley’s sense of humor throughout the novel, such as describing an imaginary friend her young neighbor has. You grow to love and understand Carley.

That Carley’s Uncle Stephen is a minister, and the novel describes the difficulties of applying God’s word to real-life issues, makes the book even better. As Carley deals with the loss of her mother to polio, she must decide if she wants to embrace her uncle’s Christian faith or reject it.

We do not know the toll that the COVID pandemic will have in the future, we collectively only know the trauma it has wrought. Most of the disabled people I have known, including Paul Longmore, became disabled from poliovirus attacking child populations. Polio was a vector for societal transformation as the disabled constructed new lives abruptly altered by the disease. This book focuses on polio survivors. Wilson surveyed over 150 polio narratives focusing on the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers (1930-1960) to learn about experiences over lifetimes. While some experienced temporary paralysis, others faced lifetime disability dealing with the disability industry, public relations campaigns, and rehabilitation programs. Survivors fought for accessibility and the ability to work in mainstream occupations. This book offers layered experiences still relevant today.

Sidhwa’s book describes the partition of India that formed present-day India and Pakistan. These tortured days and the tragedies and massacres that followed are viewed through the lens of a gentle and educated Parsi family. The narrator is Lenny, a young girl afflicted with polio, whose active observations center on the members of her family and servants. Her eighteen-year-old Ayah and the devotion of the ice-candy man play out against the backdrop of terrible hatred and betrayal, where religious affiliation trumps all, even what some call love, and others, lust. 

This book had me weeping for days. Its simplicity is deceptive. The simple narration from a six-year-old is entirely believable, the confusion of what really happened, and what it means. But the adult me could read between the lines and understand the full measure of tragedy, the horror, the inevitable result. And I was glad that Lenny was too young… show more.

This 1977 novel is one of the books that made me want to be a writer, and I’ve read it more times than I can count.

I love the fact that it’s about a tomboy who lets a new friend believe that she is a boy. The historical background of the polio epidemic is interesting (and newly relevant). And I especially like that it breaks one of the “rules” about books for kids, which is that they shouldn’t include too much about the adults. But why not? Adults had a huge impact on me as a kid, for better or worse, and they’ve always interested me as characters.