Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio (Anniversary Edition) - Hardcover

Kehret, Peg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807574597 ISBN 13: 9780807574591

Publisher: Albert Whitman & Company, 2006

Synopsis

This anniversary edition includes an updated and extended epilogue about the author's experiences since the original publication. It also includes twelve pages of new photos and a lengthy section about polio, past and present.

About this title

About the Author:

Peg Kehret was born Margaret Ann Schulze in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, on Nov. 11, 1936. She has one older brother, Art Schulze. The family moved to Austin, Minnesota, when Peg was eight. She had a happy and normal childhood except for a bout with polio which paralyzed her from the neck down and hospitalized her for nine months. However, she made nearly a complete recovery. She graduated from Austin High School and attended the University of Minnesota for one year.

From Kirkus Reviews:

From a writer known for her fiction, a moving memoir about a 12-year-old who got polio in 1949 in Austin, Minnesota. Kehret (Earthquake Terror, 1996, etc.) describes the disease, the diagnosis, the severe symptoms, treatments, physical therapy, slow recovery, and return home with walking sticks--and how she was forever changed. After her fever broke and she lay paralyzed in the hospital, her parents delivered a big brown packet of letters from her classmates. ``I had a strange feeling that I was reading about a different lifetime . . . none of this mattered. I had faced death. I had lived with excruciating pain and with loneliness and uncertainty about the future. Bad haircuts and lost ball games would never bother me again.'' There are touching black-and-white photographs of her roommates, who had already been there for ten years. Kehret's were the only parents who visited her each Sunday, and soon ``adopted'' her fellow polio victims. A simple, direct, and sometimes self-deprecating style of writing tenderly draws readers into Kehret's experiences and the effects of the disease firsthand. Almost a half-century later, this lovely book refocuses attention on what matters most: health, love of family, friends, determination, generosity, and compassion. (Nonfiction. 8-13) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Albert Whitman & Company
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0807574597
• ISBN 13: 9780807574591
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208