This is a book that I really hated but the last two or three pages were really worth reading. If you're an avid reader, in your late twenties or early thirties and you have heard about it or were planning to read it, I'd highly advice you not to waste your time. Instead you might want to read the below summary for an overall look about the story and spare yourself the boredom I felt. I have no personal issue with the author or anything, this was the first book I read by him but I was disappointed beyond description.
Keywords: Polio, war, love, tragedy, guilt
The book cover is one of the most appealing I have ever came across, so was the title but the latter wasn't really very linked to the story
Summary: It is 1944 and Newark is having one of the hottest summers. The
country is facing both war and a polio epidemic. No one knows what causes Polio
and there is no treatment for it yet. Bucky Cantor, a 23 year old lost his
mother as a child and was raised by his grandparents. They made sure he gets a
very good education and that he grows up to be a very well mannered man unlike
his father was. They also teach him to be strong and count on himself. He grows
fund of physical training realizing its importance in building one up and
eventually becomes a physical education teacher. Despite his physical aptness,
being a weight lifter and a javelin thrower, he still fails to join the army
because of his poor site. He is appointed however as playground director in the
Jewish Weequahic section of the city. Polio has not reached this section. But the
disease will burst right after a group of Italians pay a visit to the
playground where Bucky trains the kids. Some kids die, others get paralyzed.
Panic takes over the families; few stop letting their kids outside the house,
others ask for the playground to be shut and some directly blame Bucky for
their kids’ illness or death. Bucky’s fiancé Marcia, worried about him, tries
constantly to convince him to stay away from the kids in the city. She
eventually succeeds at finding him a job with her at the summer camp in the
Poconos. He first hesitates because he is the only one to take care of his
grandmother but then upon her encouragement, he accepts and quits his job as
playground director. Bucky is very affected by the blaming fingers people are
pointing at him. He is also affected by the children’s deaths or paralysis not
to forget his shame of not being able to join the war. He definitely needed to
take a break from his city and this disease and joining his fiancé seemed as
the perfect solution. He was also planning on asking her to marry him, after he
got the approval of her parents. At the camp, Bucky now a changed man,
questions the existence of God, blames him and this has negative repercussions
on his relationship with this fiancé. What makes it even worse is the death of
his best friend at war. But miraculously, Bucky steps out of his negativity
after an encounter with a butterfly and he realizes how much satisfying his job
is “there could be no more satisfying job for a man than giving a boy
learning a sport. Along with the basic instruction, the security and confidence
that all will be well and getting him over the fear of new experience” and
decides to go back to his playground director duties. At the same time, some of
the kids at the camp, including Marcia’s sister, contract Polio and so Bucky
suspects he is the carrier of Polio that brought the disease with him to camp.
It turns out to be true, but he survives Polio only to be left with a
deformation in his spine and leg with partial disability. He also breaks up
with Marcia “I owed her freedom”. In 1971, one of Bucky’s students at
the playground bumps into him in the streets and finds out that Bucky never
forgave himself for being a Polio carrier, and live all these years alone as
means of punishment. To his student and many others however, Bucky the javelin
thrower, have always and remained “Hercules”, “the strongest man on earth”,
the “invincible”.
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