Polio: An American Story
by David Oshinsky
🏆 Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for History
The engrossing story of the race to find a polio vaccine, which combines clear science writing with meticulously researched history; its stories of researchers’ rivalries, sensationalist reporting, and the gap between laboratory vision and the reality in the ward are just as relevant today as they were in 1930s America.
Recommendations from our site
“What I find so impressive about this book is that Oshinsky really does cover the whole history of a disease but does so in a way that you never feel you’re getting a CliffsNotes version. It’s a pretty unwieldy topic: you could write an entire book just about the year the polio vaccine was rolled out, or what happened since then, or you could write a book, as Paul Offit did, just about the Cutter incident. All the way through Polio you feel like you are getting all the details you would want or need. To combine that much information in a way that was not only accessible and exciting and readable but also scientifically rigorous was a real, real accomplishment.” Read more...
Seth Mnookin, Science Writer
