The Broken Boy

by Patrick Cockburn

In this expanded edition of a widely praised book, now available for the first time in North America, the renowned journalist Patrick Cockburn looks at his experience of contracting polio as a child in the context of a new pandemic, that of COVID-19. The parallels between what happened 65 years ago and today’s crisis are both striking and salutary. Cockburn was just six when he woke up one day in the summer of 1956 with a headache and a sore throat. His parents, Claud and Patricia, had recently returned to Ireland, to their house in East Cork, careless of the fact that polio had broken out in Cork City. Patrick caught the disease and was taken to the fever hospital. The virus attacks the nerves of the brain and the spinal cord, leading to paralysis of the muscles. Patrick could no longer walk. The Broken Boy  is at once a memoir of Patrick Cockburn’s own experience of polio, a portrait of his parents, both prominent radicals, and the story of the Cork epidemic, the last great polio epidemic in the world.

Genres: Memoir

350 pages, Paperback

First published September 27, 2005

About the author

Patrick Oliver Cockburn is an Irish journalist who has been a Middle East correspondent since 1979 for the Financial Times and, presently, The Independent.

He has written four books on Iraq's recent history. He won the Martha Gellhorn Prize in 2005, the James Cameron Prize in 2006 and the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2009.

Reviews

[Toni Umar · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this very interesting, my Poppy had polio and I never really understood what it was all about. But this book was amazing in the description of a child diagnised with polio and what the community at the time said must happen - even tho there was absolutely no evidence that it helped!! Well written and I often felt I was there with the young boy. A true and in some wat=ys surreal story, good!

[Patricia Normanly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was most interesting to read during Covid19 pandemic. Similarity was striking in terms of fear, lack of knowledge, lack of vaccine, isolation and tracing, hand-washing, business & political influence. As well as covering the polio epidemic in Cork, he gives some interesting researched information on the virus. Also a good social record of life of an Anglo Irish family in 1950s Ireland. Book is now out of print but available as ebook on Kindle.

[Felicity · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read separate memoirs by the author's parents, I was interested to read Patrick Cockburn's own record of his childhood illness and of the state of the Irish Health Service at the time of the polio epidemic. Cockburn's prodigious memory and journalist's training have stood him well in his engaging and thoroughly substantiated account of this mid-twentieth-century scourge.

[Michael Martin]

The writer's pieces on the Iraq war and beyond were exemplary. This is a brilliant combination of personal memoir, family history and journalistic investigation. Even more relevant since the covid pandemic.