She Treads Softly: Polio: An American Story

Saturday, February 24, 2007

Polio: An American Story

Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky was a Pulitzer Prize winner in History for 2006. This book lives up to it's recommendations. It really is an engrossing historical account of the crusade to find a vaccination for poliomyelitis. Oshinsky details how FDR helped raise awareness of polio, the creation of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, and the March of Dimes. All the scientific professional rivalries, missteps, and breakthroughs are carefully placed in a historical context and covered equitably. The main rivalry in the history of the polio vaccination was between Albert Sabin and Jonas Salk. They represent the two camps of virologists: those who believed in an attenuated live-virus vaccine (Sabin) versus those who believed in a killed-virus vaccine (Salk).

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.