5 comments about A Nearly Normal Life.

1. I don't write many reviews anymore, who has time? However, this book stood out so much above the rest I've read lately that I just had to share. The book is about a polio survivor, the 50's, the discovery of the vaccine and oh so much more. It's about living the life you were handed, not the want you thought you were going to get.

   His epilogue is pure poetry. An example: "Life continues to change. New things surface; old wounds hidden by bigger wounds show up when the bigger wounds are healed; new clusters of misgivings and confusion take shape to replace old clusters of exhausted adjustments. New things come along to be accepted with grace and peace. The disability and its challenges continue to evolve, and one must achieve acceptance and grace and peace again and again, day after day."

   I highly recommend this book to everyone. I read about 5 books a week and this book is in my top 20 of all time.




2. From long experience with this area, Mee's accounts both of the era of his youth and the experiences of polio ring very true from the pen of an accomplished writer. One senses that Mee never really made peace with his disability and its impact, inasmuch as he was able to evade, compensate, head into intellectual endeavors, etc., so there are many polio/disability issues not well dealt with here. (Significantly it ends with his finding an oasis in the intellectual world of the Ivy League and the intellect.) However, one has to suspect that the decision to tell the story, with insight and honesty, may represent at long last a step in addressing what he may have hoped at one time to simply "leave behind." Perhaps there will be a sequel in which his historical training and writing skills are again focused on the complex interrelationships between disability, psyche and society. This is a good read, though, even if it is not the full story.



3. For those interested in understanding the impact of polio, this is the definitive source. No one tells the story like Charles Mee. The depth of his insights are stunning. He makes a powerful comment on the human condition. This book is a MUST READ.



4. In 1953, when he was a robust 14-year-old, Charles L. Mee was stricken with viral polio. This memoir describes his struggle with polio, and also comments on the treatments (sometimes horrific) that were tried to beat this virus that, in 1953 alone, struck over 50,000 people. His struggle was not an easy one, and his later life wasn't either, but he comes to terms with his limitations, becoming a successful historian and playright. It's a real eye-opener, and he doesn't mince words, which makes for a compelling read.



5. I think if the author hadn't written his memoir in such a vain way--it would have been better??

2 comments about Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet (Large Print Edition): An Autobiography.

1. I undertook to read this book because an introduction to Mary Barton, the first novel of Mrs. Glaskell, mentioned this book as the first novel of Charles Kingsley and suggested it was worth reading. I cannot see how anyone could enjoy reading this awful book. The story it tells is really inane, I thought, tho I know one should make allowances for the period in which it was written. But we all know Dickens wrote in the same time period and his works still enthrall readers. I cannot imagine anyone being enthralled by this work. It does not help that Kingsley for entirely gratuituous reasons periodically snarls at what he calls "papists" with obvious bigotry. Towards the end there is a long chapter devoted to telling of a dream Alton Locke had, which I only was able to keep reading because I was determined to finish the book, since I seldom quit reading a book once I have decided, wisely or unwisely, to read it. Unless you are going to write a thesis or something on Kingsley you will be glad you did not decide to read this book.



2. Set in 1840s England, Alton Locke becomes apprenticed to a tailor as a young man and learns first-hand the miseries of the working classes. He is also a poet, but when his revolutionary poems are to be published, he agrees to the publisher's wish to revise them and "popularize" them for the sake of sales. He later regrets this decision. At first an avowed Chartist (Chartists were reformers interested in passing laws helpful to the industrial workers, especially regarding suffrage) Locke later becomes a Christian Socialist. Much of the novel is taken up with political speeches and diatribes against the tyranny businesses use against their workers. Some of that is interesting from a historical point of view, but the work as a novel suffers much because of it. The strangest chapter might be the one entitled "Dreamland," where Locke in a dream imagines he evolved from primitive life forms through higher stages to the human form. (It is as strange to the work at large as Chaplin's dream sequence is at the end of THE KID.) Locke dies while sailing to America. More a historical curiosity today, this novel was one of the first in England to deal with working-class conditions.

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