Review by Choice Review
Clark, a journalist, has written a thorough, riveting account of the events that brought about the recent water crisis in Flint, MI, and its aftermath. Prior to the catastrophe, she writes in the prologue, "Flint sat atop a teetering tower of debt, dysfunctional urban policy, disappearing investment, disintegrating infrastructure, and a compromised democratic process." These factors combined with a series of poor decisions by city and state officials to bring about a public health disaster of epic proportions, which included lead poisoning as well as outbreaks of E. coli and Legionnaires' disease. Clark is attentive to the role that the history of deindustrialization played in Flint's weakening economy as well as how insufficient and discriminatory public health policies made the water disaster possible. Her discussion of systematic racism and disenfranchisement would be enhanced by sociological literature on urban segregation, such as Douglas Massey's American Apartheid (CH, Jun'93, 30-5888). Similarly, considering the neoliberal implications of the emergency management system she describes would strengthen her account of the multiple ways in which the government failed Flint residents. Nevertheless, the book explains the tragedy and attempts to first downplay it--and later to remedy it--well. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Julie Anne Beicken, Rocky Mountain College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
on A cool spring day in April 2014, Dayne Walling, the mayor of Flint, Mich., entered an old water-treatment plant and, amid cheers from a crowd of city officials and engineers, pushed a small black button on a cinder-block wall. With that gesture, the mayor switched Flint's water supply from a tested and reliable source provided by the city of Detroit to a cheaper and untested one, the nearby Flint River. City officials defended the move as necessary cost-cutting for a bankrupt city. Like his colleagues, Walling - a Rhodes scholar who had a master's degree in urban studies - believed that Flint, by deciding to rely on its own river for water, was taking control of its destiny. He called it "a historic moment." He was certainly right about that, although probably not in the way he foresaw. By changing the source of the city's water, Walling and other local and state officials touched off a chain of events that led to one of the biggest public-health disasters of our time. The water from the Flint River turned out to be highly corrosive, causing the city's old pipes to leach lead into the drinking water. Lead has been known for decades to cause irreversible damage to human brains and nervous systems, especially children's. Yet in Flint, a predominantly African-American city, nobody worried too much about it. City officials ignored laws requiring that anti-corrosion agents be added to the water to reduce the risk of lead buildup. Water tests were done haphazardly. Officials rigged data and intimidated activists. Thousands of kids drank water that may have permanently harmed their brains. This "is the story of a government poisoning its own citizens, and then lying about it," Mona Hanna-Attisha writes in her gripping memoir about the crisis, "What the Eyes Don't See." "ft is a story about what happens when the very people responsible for keeping us safe care more about money and power than they care about us, or our children." If there is anyone well positioned to make this argument, it's Hanna-Attisha, the director of the pediatric residency program at Hurley Medical Center, a teaching hospital affiliated with Michigan State University. Hanna-Attisha's analysis of Flint residents' blood tests proved indisputably that they were being poisoned and exposed the official denials and obfuscation as a crime of tragic proportions. She is disarmingly modest about her role. "1 was just the last piece," she writes near the end of the book. "The state wouldn't stop lying until somebody came along to prove that real harm was being done to kids. Then the house of cards fell." Hanna-Attisha's book covers a monthlong period in the middle of the crisis, roughly from the moment she learned about lead in Flint's water to a news conference she held announcing test results showing high lead levels in residents' blood. Hanna-Attisha is a chatty and entertaining narrator. And while Fm not sure 1 needed to hear about her mother's crepes with "gooey Nutella on top," or to eavesdrop on her pillow talk with her husband about the emotional drama of the day, these are minor sins. Her book has power precisely because she takes the events she recounts so personally. Before she knew Flint's water was contaminated, Hanna-Attisha encouraged mothers who came to her clinic to mix baby formula with tap water; the guilt she later feels is heart-rending. As a mother and a pediatrician, she also understands the vulnerability of children in a city like Flint, where, she points out, the life span of the average child is 15 years shorter than that of a child born in a neighboring suburb. "When 1 found out that a group home for abused and neglected kids near the hospital had a water-lead level over 5,000" parts per billion, she writes, "1 was the maddest and saddest I'd ever been in my life." (The federally mandated action level for lead in drinking water is 15 parts per billion.) For Hanna-Attisha, Flint's water crisis was not just a personal tragedy but a betrayal of the American dream. Her mother and father were born in Iraq and watched with horror from abroad as their country was overtaken by the fundamentalist regime that eventually led to Saddam Hussein. "The promise of America worked for my family," she writes. "We'd left a country that was broken, unsafe, unpredictable and oppressing its own people for a country that allowed us to thrive." A great virtue of her book is the moral outrage present on every page. "There are lots of villains in this story," she says with refreshing bluntness, and she goes after many of them, from the (white) mayor of Flint to the public-health officials who claimed that ensuring safe drinking water was not their responsibility. Brad Würfel, the spokesman for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality during the crisis, who frequently reassured Flint's citizens about their water's safety - "Anyone who is concerned about lead in the drinking water in Flint can relax," he said early on - gets particularly venomous treatment. For better or worse, there are no clear villains in "The Poisoned City," by Anna Clark. A journalist based in Detroit, Clark takes a broader, more measured approach to the Flint crisis, keeping herself out of the story and aiming for what she has called "a collective narrative" of the local community. She is a smart, hard-working reporter who knows she has a great tale to tell, and if the narrative gets lost in bureaucratic minutiae at times (who knew that Genesee County had a drain commissioner?), it's easy to forgive because you admire her passion and her sweat. Clark is particularly good at describing the importance of infrastructure in a functioning democracy: "Public water systems are one of this country's most heroic accomplishments, a feat so successful that it is almost invisible." In "The Poisoned City," you will learn that the average water main in Flint is more than 80 years old; that the drinking-water supply system is made up of 15,000 lead service lines; that the only way to figure out where these lines are is to sort through a file box containing 45,000 index cards scrawled with notes in smudged pencil; and that, as a result of leaky old pipes laid when Flint was a much larger city, residents' water bills averaged $149 a month, compared with $58 a month in neighboring Burton. Clark writes powerfully about the environmental consequences of a shrinking city, about how Flint's financial decline drove the decision to switch drinking-water sources. She also discusses an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease, related to the water crisis, that led to 12 deaths. But she's most effective describing the racism that shaped Flint, especially under the influence of General Motors. In the 1920s, G.M. built thousands of houses for workers, but these could not " be leased to or occupied by any person or persons not wholly of the white or Caucasian race." As Clark points out, "the apartheid approach to city building wasn't just tolerated by the federal government; it was exacerbated by it." Black neighborhoods were redlined for federal mortgages, cutting off their residents from home loans and a path to middle-class prosperity. Of the nearly 6,000 houses built in Flint in the early 1950s, fewer than 100 were open to AfricanAmericans. City officials performed in blackface in minstrel shows, and black children were allowed in the local pool only on Wednesdays. Is it any surprise that more than 50 years later, when black kids were being poisoned by the city's drinking water, nobody took action? In the end, many of the officials involved in the Flint crisis were fired or indicted on criminal charges ranging from obstructing an investigation to involuntary manslaughter. But there are no whistle-blowers in Clark's book, no single bureaucrat who decided to poison the children of the city in order to save a few bucks in the budget. In a way, that's her point. As she writes, "Neglect, it turns out, is not a passive force in American cities, but an aggressive one." For Hanna-Attisha, the story of Flint is about the loss of the American dream, and the importance of community bonds and family life. "The most important medication 1 can prescribe is hope," she writes, sounding a bit too much as if she's auditioning for "The Oprah Winfrey Show." But perhaps the best way to read these two worthy books is as a preview of America's future. Many of the factors that led to tragedy in Flint - the disregard for environmental law, the unwillingness to invest in rotting infrastructure, the distrust of science, the lying officials and, above all, the racism that still shapes many state and federal policies - are the guiding principles of the Trump administration. The sad truth is that we are all living in versions of Flint now. JEFF goodell is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and the author of "The Water Will Come."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 31, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In the first full accounting of the Flint water crisis, Clark combines a staggering amount of research and several intimate story lines to reveal how the Michigan city was poisoned by its leaders and then largely abandoned to its fate by state officials. Entirely a man-made environmental catastrophe, the incident made Flint the face of America's burgeoning infrastructure meltdown. Incisive and informed, Clark takes readers through events in the city's political, social, and cultural history as she focuses on the circumstances that brought in an emergency manager. The state's rampant disregard for Flint's residents and struggling economy is mind-blowing, and the many officials (including some in the EPA) who exerted more energy covering up the crisis than stopping it emerge as cowards of the first order. Clark takes no prisoners, naming all the names and presenting the confirming research. Neglect, she warns, is not a passive force in American cities, but an aggressive one. The Poisoned City is an environmental tent revival for people who continue to suffer and a call to arms for everyone who values professional local journalism. Amen, Anna Clark, Amen.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Clark (Michigan Literary Luminaries: From Elmore Leonard to Robert Hayden) provides a comprehensive account of the Flint water crisis. Drawing on both existing and original reporting, Clark boils down this complex tragedy and chronologically traces the series of reckless decisions by city and state officials that led to the poisoning of a city: the changing of the water source, trust in an insufficient treatment program, failure to acknowledge residents' complaints, and repeated cover-ups. The book also demonstrates how, rather than the result of a single decision, the tragedy was "a decades-old, slow-burn emergency" rooted in such broader social, political, and economic trends as industry divestment and population decline, underfunding of cities, inequality and the legacy of segregation, and a "democracy deficit" caused by the emergency management system. Clark also sprinkles in compelling forays into the history of lead, the initial settling of the area, and the early development of public water systems. While devastating, this account is also inspiring in its coverage of the role of Flint's "lionhearted residents" and their grassroots activism, community organizing, and independent investigation in bringing the crisis to national attention and to the courts. This extremely informative work gives an authoritative account of a true American urban tragedy that still continues. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Detroit-based journalist Clark provides a compelling account of the still-unfolding Flint, MI, water crisis. This work puts this complex environmental, public health, and human rights disaster in historical and political context. Moving fluidly back and forth between contemporary events and the long history of racialized inequity in Flint, Clark demonstrates how systemic disinvestment in public infrastructure threatens the health and safety of all citizens-and disproportionately puts the poor and people of color at risk. Readers are also introduced to individuals who collaborated to bring the story of Flint's contaminated water system to national attention: Flint resident LeeAnne Walters, Miguel Del Toral at the Environmental Protection Agency's regional office in Chicago, investigative journalist Curt Guyette, and environmental engineer Marc Edwards of Virginia Tech. Following their years-long search for answers and ongoing struggle for restitution, Clark reminds us how access to safe water became only a recent expectation in the United States and how fragile and dependent on enforcement that access remains. VERDICT A compelling must-read about issues of environmental activism, urban issues, systemic racism, and the accountability of the government to the people whom it serves.-Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Massachusetts Historical Soc. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The story of the Flint, Michigan, water crisis.In 2014, the city of Flintpop. 99,000, majority blackturned off its drinking water in preparation for joining a new regional water system. In the meantime, the city began using Flint River water. Officials said the interim source was safe. It wasn't. In this complex, exquisitely detailed account, freelance journalist and Detroit Free Press contributor Clark (Michigan Literary Luminaries, 2015, etc.) draws on interviews, emails, and other materials to describe the ensuing catastrophe, in which city, state, and federal officials engaged in delays and coverups for 18 months while residents complained of discolored drinking water that caused rashes, hair loss, and diseases. Citizen demands for government action went ignored, "even ridiculed," until public pressure, media coverage, and independent studies revealed the cause of the contaminated water: lead and other toxins traveling through aging pipes that lacked mandated corrosion control. The shameful story has its heroese.g., persistent engineer Marc Edwards, journalist Curt Guyette, and NPR's Michigan Radioand its "buck-passing and turf-guarding" villains, including countless officials who dodged responsibilities while lead-laced water killed 12 people and left a lingering uncertainty over possible long-term health effects. "An Obscene Failure of Government," said a Detroit Free Press story. Clark goes far beyond the immediate crisiscaptured nationally in images of bottled water being distributed to Flint's poor, the most severely affectedto explain "decades of negligence" that had mired the city in "debt, dysfunctional urban policy, disappearing investment, disintegrating infrastructure, and a compromised democratic process." She warns that other declining American cities are similarly threatened. A report of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission pointed to the long-standing "systemic racism" of segregated Flint, once a General Motors-led innovation hub that attracted many African-American workers. The city faces continuing lawsuits and use of bottled water until lead pipes are replaced by 2020.A potent cautionary tale of urban neglect and indifference. Infuriated readers will be heartened by the determined efforts of protesters and investigative reporters. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
