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Compelling tales well told

Works involving polio, an intelligent horse, Peruvian orphans and a Vietnamese-American family's struggle are on the menu at the Times Festival of Reading.

By Times Staff Writers
Published October 25, 2005

The saga of how polio was conquered is told through the eyes of the powerful, and sometimes clashing, personalities who helped defeat it. A tall tale about an extraordinary horse and his trainer, an ex-slave and self-taught veterinarian, turns out to be true. A simple narrative by a bestselling novelist reminds us "the surest way to minimize your own burdens is to carry someone else's." The Vietnam War is re-examined through the eyes of a Vietnamese-American.

These four story lines come from books that will be presented at the 13th annual Times Festival of Reading on Saturday at the University of South Florida at St. Petersburg. For a glimpse in advance, here are reviews of each.

-- MARGO HAMMOND, St. Petersburg Times book editor

***

Polio: An American Story

By David M. Oshinsky

Oxford University Press, $30, 288 pages

In the vast ocean of history, individual humans are mere water droplets that make up the crashing waves of change.

In Polio: An American Story, the opposite seems true - the colossal egos of two individuals, Jonas Salk and Alfred Sabin, clash with such force that they seem to generate the great historical wave that swept a terrifying disease from American life.

By focusing on the personalities involved, historian David M. Oshinsky brings passion and drama to this oft-told story about the quest to develop a vaccine against polio. That doesn't mean he skimps on the science. He provides a remarkably lucid explanation, for example, of the difference between the killed-virus vaccine that Salk brought to a grateful public in 1955, and Sabin's live-virus alternative, introduced a few years later, which was used to nearly eradicate polio from the globe.

Still, the power of Oshinsky's highly readable account lies in the way he outlines the motivations and the personality quirks not just of these two scientists, but also of secondary characters. We see, for example, how Franklin D. Roosevelt's struggle with polio led him, as president, to promote the fundraising efforts that generated millions of dollars to help polio victims. And we witness the audacity of Sister Elizabeth Kenny, an Australian physical therapist who, without a bit of evidence to back up her claims, convinced Americans that the most effective treatment for polio involved packing crippled children in layers of hot, steaming wool, thereby "re-educating" their muscles. The popularity of her preposterous technique merely reveals the desperation of Americans who had no idea how to combat this horrible, heart-breaking disease.

Today, the dread inspired by polio is all but forgotten, but Oshinsky considers the story of its conquest "a lens through which to study the culture of the mid 20th-century United States." The conquest of polio, he asserts, is "truly an American story."

- TOM VALEO

***

Beautiful Jim Key: The Lost History of a Horse and Man Who Changed the World

By Mim Eichler Rivas

Morrow, $25.95, 334 pages

For years, many thought the story of Beautiful Jim Key and his trainer, Dr. William Key, was a tall tale. Records had been burned. Artifacts had been stored and forgotten. But when Mim Eichler Rivas of East Tennessee heard the story, she was determined to track down the truth.

Just the life of the horse would have been enough for a book.

Crippled at birth, Beautiful Jim Key grew up tall and handsome. He learned to spell, do math and even make change. He chose a political party, made jokes and played to the ladies. At the end of the 1800s, he was a hit on the touring circuit.

The life of Dr. William Key also fills a book. A former slave, Key was a self-taught veterinarian, liniment maker and salesman from Shelbyville, Tenn. During the Civil War, he went with his master's sons into the Confederate Army to guard them because he said he loved them. When he could, however, he aided the Union Army.

Key could calm the wildest animal. When he recognized something special in Jim Key, he decided to show what kindness and patience in training could accomplish. They hooked up with a promoter and traveled to fairs, expositions, shows and theaters becoming the needed symbol for the groups coalescing to fight animal abuse.

Beautiful Jim Key weaves these stories of horse and trainer together while placing them in the context of their times, as Laura Hillenbrand did in Seabiscuit, offering a narrative that is even more exciting than a tall tale because every word is true.

- SHARON BOND

***

The Sunflower

By Richard Paul Evans

Simon & Schuster, $19.95, 352 pp.

Beginning with his 1995 bestseller Christmas Box, Richard Paul Evans has specialized in simple, old-fashioned stories of love and kindnesses. His latest, The Sunflower, is a tearjerker that again uses the holiday season as a backdrop.

The story opens in St. Paul, Minn. Paul Cook, an emergency room doctor, is covering his shift after celebrating Christmas with his fiancee.

The night turns tragic when two patients, a 5-year-old child and a 44-year-old father of five, die under his care. Devastated and blaming himself, Paul abandons his successful career and heads for the jungles of Peru in search of redemption.

After visiting the sacred city of Machu Picchu and hiking the Chocaqui, the Incan Trail, Paul discovers a new passion: working with youth who live at an orphanage, El Girasol ("the sunflower"). In his diary, he writes: "The surest way to minimize your own burdens is to carry someone else's."

Meanwhile, in Dayton, Ohio, Christine Hollister, a dental hygienist, is jilted at the altar. Her childhood friend, Jessica, in an attempt to help Christine with her heartache, lines up a trip - a humanitarian mission to Peru. "They say the best cure for a broken heart is to give of yourself," Jessica declares.

Evans entwines these two tales in Cuzco where Christine and Paul have a fateful meeting that changes both their lives.

Evans modeled his El Girasol after the Colibri ("the hummingbird"), an orphanage in Lucre, Peru, that is supported by his nonprofit foundation, the Christmas Box House International. Because of the author's first-hand knowledge of such a facility, his descriptions of the childrens' plights are true to life, his characters' reactions to the children's suffering, intense.

Sugar-coated? At times. Inspirational? Without a doubt.

- PIPER CASTILLO

***

A Sense Of Duty: My Father, My American Journey

By Quang X. Pham

Ballantine, $24.95, 288pp

A Sense of Duty unapologetically, if not somewhat defiantly, offers an insight into the Vietnam War through South Vietnamese eyes - the author's and those of his fighter pilot father who fought alongside Americans.

In this heart-churning chronicle, Quang Pham leads readers through his family's frantic escape from Vietnam just ahead of the fall of Saigon, their American odyssey and his quest to discover the truth about his father's wartime experiences.

Quang Pham was 10 the night his father, Hoa Pham, dashed home to get his wife, three daughters and son and put them on a military plane that would take them out of Vietnam. He chose to stay. A pilot trained in the United States, Hoa Pham felt it was his duty to remain at his post.

"I'll see you later," the author remembers his father saying. It would be 17 years before he would see his father again. The communists sent Hoa Pham to "re-education" camps, where he was held for more than 12 years.

The rest of the family, meanwhile, settled in California. The author tells of the struggle to learn English, the humiliation of shopping with food stamps and participating in subsidized school lunch programs. It was a struggle without a father and husband, but the family's indomitable spirit won out.

His mother bought their first home in 1981. She held several jobs during the day and studied for an associate's degree in accounting at night. Later, at 60, she joined the Peace Corps and headed to the Republic of Kazakhstan. Quang Pham, who graduated from UCLA, followed in the footsteps of his absent father and went into military service. He joined the Marines, became a pilot and fought in the Gulf War.

Reuniting with his father was bittersweet. In a sense, Hoa Pham and his American family were strangers. The former South Vietnamese pilot and his wife eventually divorced. The author, though, persisted in trying to learn about his father's wartime experience. Much, after all, he notes in his book, had been said about the South Vietnamese unwillingness to fight for their country and about corruption in the country's military ranks.

There's no escaping the author's bitterness about America's handling of the Vietnam War and its portrayal by journalists and filmmakers. But he also expresses gratitude for his adopted country and those who helped his family.

Above all though, Quang Pham's book is a tribute to his father, who died of a stroke at 65. He had been in America for just eight years.

-- WAVENEY ANN MOORE

[Last modified October 24, 2005, 16:47:03]