A devastatingly important read.
A veteran journalist and scholar reveals the long-ranging impacts of environmental racism on black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities.
In this heart-wrenching exposé, the author of Medical Apartheid (2007) zeroes in on the “chemical Armageddon” that has “preferentially affected” black, Indigenous, and Latinx peoples with “chemicals known or strongly suspected to lower intelligence.” To frame her thorough study, Washington (Infectious Madness: The Surprising Science of How We "Catch" Mental Illness, 2016, etc.) uses the flawed metric of IQ scores. Though she acknowledges their faulty premise and biased administration, she uses them to describe cognitive impacts because the scores serve as “a predictor of success in school, social settings, work achievements, and lifetime earnings.” Citing cases around the United States, Washington clearly presents her research on the expansive effects of toxins, heavy metals, and even drugs that are disproportionately funneled into marginalized communities of color: lead contamination in Baltimore and Flint, where the “water’s lead levels were so high that it fell into the EPA’s classification for hazardous waste”; polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) poisoning in Anniston, Alabama (“a PCB concentration of just 5 parts per billion in a pregnant mother’s blood can have adverse effects on a developing fetal brain”), and the forced implantation of the toxic Norplant (“a surgically inserted contraceptive that can be removed only by a physician and lasts for five years”) in black and Latin women. Along with many other well-documented examples, these injustices reveal a chilling reality: Marginalized people of color face not only rampant public health impacts, but also societal blame for their plight. The author also offers “steps that individuals can take to fight for a less toxic environment,” uplifting the grassroots environmental justice organizing of black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities. She also provides a helpful glossary and long list of “Known Chemical Brain Drainers.” The book falls short only in its lack of a discussion of ableism and its role in marginalizing those with altered cognitive development.
A devastatingly important read.Pub Date: July 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-50943-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2019
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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