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Tony Gould, A summer plague: polio and its survivors, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1995, pp. xvi, 366, illus., 19.95 (hardback 0-300-06292-3);12.95 (paperback (1997) 0-300-07276-7).
Books on polio have proliferated in the past several years, reflecting in part a growing concern with "post-polio syndrome"-the reappearance of symptoms among people who had believed that they had conquered their polio paralysis some decades earlier. English journalist Tony Gould's idiosyncratic history is inspired by an awareness that the history of polio did not end with the Salk and Sabin vaccines, and by the publicized activism of the disabled. In his preface, Gould acknowledges that, through writing this book, he discovered that he had both "overvalued" his own experience with polio "in the sense of regarding my experience of polio as somehow unique" and undervalued it "by not allowing that it had made any substantial difference to my way of life and thinking" (p. xvi). A summer plague is a story full of colourful people and moments. It is a breezy, engaging social history of epidemic polio in the United States and-more briefly-in Britain....