BOOK REVIEW: "Breath: A Lifetime in the Rhythm of an Iron Lung"
By Martha Mason, Bloomsbury USA, Paperback, 2010, 368 pages, $16
Martha Mason's "Breath: A Lifetime in the Rhythm of an Iron Lung" is relatively short as memoirs go, but it's not a quick read. Therein lies its strength and weakness. The author's voice and style command praise, but the reader is ultimately left searching for something more substantial.
Mason, born in 1937 in Lattimore, North Carolina, contracted polio as an 11-year-old girl. She spent the next 61 years of her life in the 800-pound bright yellow, steel cylinder that made it possible for her to breathe, only emerging for short intervals to be bathed and turned.
Soon after learning that she will live in an iron lung until she dies (which her doctor then said might be only a few years), Mason resolves never to be a "Barbara" (a helpless, whiny girl in her second-grade class who needed help with everything after she broke her arm). She also credits her enormous will to live and excel to her competitive spirit and her tireless mother, Euphra Mason. She went on to graduate from high school, Gardner-Webb College and Wake Forest University, first in her class at each school. Clearly, Martha possesses no ordinary zest for life.
The memoir begins in Mason's twilight years, as she's caring for her Alzheimer's-stricken mother, the same mother who acted as nurse, scribe and moral buttress to her since contracting polio.
Mason describes how, all from her iron lung, she runs her household: hires and manages caretakers for herself and her mother, plans meals, pays bills and entertains friends with all the savvy and