Author Description

James Ure’s remembrance of his father’s childhood is as vivid as Stephen King’s Stand by Me, conjuring for readers another time and place—one that will be familiar to older readers with a memory of the polio pandemic and of interest to a younger generation because Ure writes with such honesty. Despite being raised a Mormon, James’s namesake father “Jimmy” took to smoking, drinking, and swearing at an early age. An even greater break with his culture was his interest in reading everything in sight at the local library, a young person’s entry into a world beyond the limits of Depression-era Utah. As the firstborn son of a voluble and controlling father, Jimmy was diagnosed with polio as a child, one of thirty million victims worldwide, but he could never forgive the Mormon elders for promising him a recovery that never came. As with many polio victims, the affliction returned to plague him as he aged. James learned the details of these experiences in his father’s outpourings. Puzzling over why fate created such dramatic mood swings in a man so dear to him, he decided to write his father’s story and determine how polio shaped his own life.