by Mona Hanna-Attisha ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 19, 2018
An important contribution to the literature of environmental activism—and environmental racism.
“There are lots of villains in this story”: An Iraqi immigrant and pediatrician recounts the epidemiological sleuthing that uncovered the lead crisis in the drinking water of Flint, Michigan.
The story begins with people turning up sick. But more, longtime Michigander and physician Hanna-Attisha’s story begins in a political moment, when a tea party–dominated state legislature and a former business executive elected governor declared a state of fiscal emergency over the city of Flint. As she notes, Flint was not alone in having its democratically elected government replaced by a technocrat imposed from outside—and those that shared the distinction were far likelier to be areas where African-Americans lived, “effectively colonized by the state.” A budgetary shortcut was to change Flint’s source of drinking water from Lake Huron to the Flint River, long used for dumping industrial waste. Bacteria was one thing, but high concentrations of lead quite another. Drinking Flint River water was “like drinking through a lead painted straw,” with resulting developmental delays and cognitive damage that will plague Flint for generations. Hanna-Attisha combined a background in environmental science and medicine to expose a multilayered conspiracy of crony capitalism involving the lead industry, which she likens to big tobacco in greed and damage, and allies in government and business. Along the way, she notes that medicine itself is not blameless, since older pediatricians in particular have assumed that the old problems of lead poisoning that plagued previous generations have gone away with regulatory changes. Not so, she writes, particularly if you are poor and a member of an ethnic minority. Making this story known proved a challenge, but the author and her allies were methodical in approaching professional journals, the press, and finally federal authorities with their evidence. In the end, writes Hanna-Attisha, this is “the story of a government poisoning its own citizens, and then lying about it”—and it demands greater justice than has been served.
An important contribution to the literature of environmental activism—and environmental racism.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-59083-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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