While polio is a physical experience, it is also a social one…. Polio does not belong just to those of us who were infected by it, but to our mothers and fathers, our sisters and brothers, our partners and our children; to those who cared for us, to those who brutalized us (often not mutually exclusive categories); to those who saw us as palimpsests [tablets] on which to write their fear, their pity, their admiration, their empathy, their discomfort.
--Anne Finger, from the online version of the Smithsonian's exhibit "Whatever Happened to Polio?"
If you enjoyed Anne Finger's earlier book, Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy, and Birth (Seal Press 1990), or her disability-themed novel Bone Truth (Coffeehouse Press 1994), you'll want to check out her new memoir, Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio (St. Martin's Press 2006), just out.
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