Describes the history of polio, the way it spreads, its major epidemics, treatments such as the iron lung and the Kenny method, and the impact of Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin's vaccines, and includes a time line, glossary, and annotated bibliography.

"When a waiting world learned on April 12, 1955, that Jonas Salk had successfully created a vaccine to prevent poliomyelitis, he became a hero overnight. Born in a New York tenement, humble in manner, Salk had all the makings of a twentieth-century icon-a knight in a white coat. In the wake of his achievement, he received a staggering number of awards and honors; for years his name ranked with Gandhi and Churchill on lists of the most revered people....

"With a searching new analysis of primary sources, NBCC award winner James Tobin reveals how FDR's fight against polio transformed him from a callow aristocrat into the energetic, determined statesman who would rally the nation in the Great Depression and lead it through World War II. When polio paralyzed Franklin Roosevelt at thirty-nine, people wept to think that the young man of golden promise must live out his days as a helpless invalid. He never...

"In popular memory, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the quintessential political "natural." Born in 1882 to a wealthy, influential family and blessed with charisma, he seemed destined for high office from birth. Yet for all his gifts, the young Roosevelt nonetheless lacked depth, empathy, and strategic ability. Those qualities, so essential to his success as president, were skills he acquired during his eight-year struggle through illness and recovery....

When Robin (Andrew Garfield) is struck down by polio at the age of 28, he is confined to a hospital bed and given only a few months to live. With the help of his wife Diana (Claire Foy) and her twin brothers, Robin and Diana dare to escape the hospital ward to seek out a full and passionate life together — raising their young son, traveling and devoting their lives to helping other polio patients. BREATHE is a heartwarming celebration of love and...

"In the aftermath of the Korean War, Peggy's small hometown is rife with anti-Communist hysteria. But Peggy has bigger problems: She's struggling to recover from polio. Taunted by her classmates, Peggy just wants to be a normal kid, until she stumbles across a mysterious object that gives her the power to fly. Unscrupulous operatives from the American and Soviet governments seek the object to overturn the tense political stalemate, and Peggy finds...

In 1940s New Orleans, Fish Elliot is a polio-survivor with a knack for inventing and building things, and his African American neighbor Olympia is a girl with a talent for messing things up, but they are united in an effort to save a starving stray dog they call Liberty--and when Liberty is caged by a nasty farmer, they find an unlikely ally in a German prisoner of war, Erich, who is not much older than the two children.