Nemesis

Such an odd little book. I was interested in the subject because my uncle, who died in the '50s, contracted polio as a child in the '20s. And although it's a dark story–finding happiness in a story about polio just wouldn't be real, I suppose–it held my attention. The narrator is a man who, as a boy, contracted polio during an epidemic in Newark New Jersey in 1944 (a fictional epidemic, I gather), but the focus of his tale is Bucky Cantor, then a 23-year-old athlete and playground director who was kept out of the Army because of his eyesight. Any more would spoil the plot, but for most of the book, I was engrossed. Up to a point, Bucky is a sympathetic character, but he makes a bad choice (possibly more than one), and that introduced too much melodrama for me.