Items related to The Broken Boy: A Memoir of Growing Up With Polio in...
Synopsis
It is very easy to get polio. The celebrated Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn was just six years old when he woke up one day in the summer of 1956 with a headache and a sore throat. His parents, Claud and Patricia Cockburn, had recently returned to Ireland, to their house in East Cork, careless of the fact that a polio epidemic had broken out in Cork City. Cockburn caught the disease and was taken to the fever hospital where, alone for the first time in his life, he was kept in isolation. The virus attacks the nerves of the brain and the spinal cord leading to paralysis of the muscles. Patrick could no longer walk.
The Broken Boy is at once a memoir of Patrick Cockburn's own experience of polio, a portrait of his parents, both prominent radicals, and the story of the Cork epidemic, the last great polio epidemic in the world, affecting 50,000 people. This terrible disease always behaved strangely, attacking the middle classes rather than the poor, children rather than adults, and striking fear everywhere."synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review
"Charming, interesting and moving by turn" (Anthony Daniels Sunday Telegraph)
"Engrossing... an often perceptive genre-defying gem...engaging and entertaining" (Tom Adair Scotland on Sunday)
"This is wonderful writing...Brilliant...Cockburn has pulled off something remarkable" (Observer)
"The best journalist's autobiography to appear for years... This is a story of endurance and a hugely adventurous mind, elegantly told" (Evening Standard)
"Sad and entertaining, and altogether evocative of a vanished Ireland" (Sunday Times)
Book Description
A memoir about the last great polio epidemic, by an author who was one of its victims.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherOr Books Llc
- Publication date2019
- ISBN 10 1944869050
- ISBN 13 9781944869052
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages336
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