A Nearly Normal Life: A Memoir

""You don't recover from the events of life, you take them with you, you knit them in, you grow with them and around them; they become who you are; they are life itself; how else my life might have been is unknowable."" The tone of Mee's memoir of learning to live with polio is an unlikely marriage of elegy and resentment overcome. Well, mostly overcome--and it's the degree to which Mee hasn't completely reconciled himself to the past that gives his book a nostalgia-puncturing edge. A playwright (The Berlin Circle) and historian (Meeting at Potsdam), Mee recalls how his world changed when he was diagnosed with polio. It was 1953, and he was 14. Although Mee recovered and fought to rebuild his damaged body enough to walk with the aid of a cane and a crutch, his carefree days of football and swimming were over. Mee evokes the aggressive optimism of the 1950s, when physicians and nurses staunchly insisted that anyone could recover and refused to acknowledge the despair of the patients in their care. As a result, many polio victims were subjected to useless operations and treatments because their frustrated doctors needed to ""do something."" Mee also describes the pervading climate of fear that polio triggered among parents and provides an informed account of how the Salk vaccine ended the epidemic. While he acknowledges that society's insistence on recovery and self-reliance did, in fact, play a role in fortifying his will to survive, Mee can't hide a certain bitterness about the emotional cost of keeping a stiff upper lip. His book is better for his honesty. Agent, Lois Wallace. (Feb.)