Book description
It is very easy to get polio. Patrick Cockburn was six when he woke
up one day in the summer of 1956 with a headache and a sore throat.
His parents, Claud and Patricia Cockburn, had recently returned to
Ireland, to their house in East Cork, careless of the fact that a
polio epidemic had broken out in Cork City. He caught the disease and
was taken to the fever hospital. The virus attacks the nerves of the
brain and the spinal cord leading to paralysis of the muscles. Patrick
could no longer walk.
The Broken Boy is at once a memoir of Patrick Cockburn's own
experience of polio, a portrait of his parents, both prominent
radicals, and the story of the Cork epidemic, the last great polio
epidemic in the world.
Patrick Cockburn writes on foreign affairs for the
Independent.
His other books include
Getting Russia Wrong
and
Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein
.
