And speaking of big awards...

David M. Oshinsky has won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for US history for Polio: An American Story (Oxford University Press 2005). There were a number of books to come out last year about polio, timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the announcement of the Salk vaccine. Some of the other polio histories recently released:

Daniel J. Wilson, Living with Polio: The Epidemic and its Survivors (University of Chicago Press 2005).

Marc Shell, Polio and its Aftermath: The Paralysis of Culture (Harvard University Press 2005).

Jeffrey Kluger, Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio (Putnam Adult 2005).

Helen D'Orazio and Sally Aitken, eds. Walking Fingers: The Story of Polio and Those who Lived with it (Vehicule Press 2004).

And there was a big exhibit called Whatever Happened to Polio? at the Smithsonian too--the web version is a model of accessible, multi-sensory online disability history--it's worth a visit.