Review by Booklist Review
While clean water has long been considered a right in the U.S., the citizens of Lowndes County, Alabama, find the opposite to be true. Lowndes County bore witness to the revolutionary Civil Rights marches in the 1960s, yet oppression of its citizens, particularly African Americans, has persisted. The county's outdated systems for handling waste water are archaic and subpar, while the price for fixing them has proven punitive to Lowndes County residents. Ninety percent of households lack adequate wastewater systems, and tropical diseases have been spawned in the region's stagnant mires of muck. Founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, Flowers has been actively engaged in civil rights work since her adolescence. With the people of Lowndes Country forced to live in squalor, and burdened by an unaffordable fix, Flowers exposes the true injustice of the situation and how it can be remedied, from both sides of the political spectrum. This is a powerful and moving book that deserves wide readership.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Who pays serious attention to the millions of Americans living with or near conditions such as raw sewage, toxic water, and poisonous air? Flowers does. The founder and director of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice (CREEJ) uncovers the unsettling details of living standards in stretches of her native Alabama as well as the urban Midwest, central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, Hawaii, Native American reservations, and elsewhere. Her account follows her activism that received attention for social justice work, from high school in Lowndes County through college to teaching at public schools in Washington, DC, Fayetteville, NC, and Detroit, and then back to Lowndes County to organize around environmental justice issues. She describes leading CREEJ to help address both immediate and systemic impacts of inadequate sanitation, health disparities, and poverty in communities marginalized because of who lives there--people who policymakers and society at large dismiss as not worthy of respect, she notes. The book includes a foreword by Bryan Stevenson. VERDICT Mixing memoir, civil rights history, and polemic, this blunt litany by Flowers delivers a call to action for all concerned about sustainable solutions to the shamefully inadequate environmental infrastructure, policies, and practices in the United States.--Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An environmental activist with the Equal Justice Initiative exposes an alarming rate of hookworm in an Alabama county with inadequate wastewater management. Imagine that your septic system fails after you lost your job because of Covid-19 or another disaster. Your yard turns into a sewer, and you don't have thousands of dollars for a new tank. Flowers shows that if your state enforces laws that criminalize the failure to maintain a legal septic tank, you could also get arrested. She sees such tragedies frequently among the mostly poor, Black residents of Lowndes County, where "an estimated 90 percent of households have failing or inadequate wastewater systems." In an imperfect blend of memoir and reporting, the author recalls her years of work to ease conditions so unsanitary a U.N. official said he hadn't seen them "in the first world." With admirable tenacity, Flowers cultivated reporters; got help from Jane Fonda; took Cory Booker to visit a man whose backyard "held a pit full of waste piped straight from his toilet"; and persuaded Baylor doctors to conduct a study of the region, which found that 34.5% of tested residents had hookworm, a disease of poor sanitation that many people thought the U.S. had eradicated. Similarly dire sewage problems, she shows, exist in places from Appalachia to the San Joaquin Valley. In a largely chronological narrative, Flowers tends to present facts in the order in which she learned them--not when readers most need to know them--and slows the pace with overlong digressions into her earlier years and unedifying passages on topics such as "turning lemons into lemonade" and the effect of Jonathan Livingston Seagull on her life. The urgent message of the book, however, transcends its writing lapses, and it should raise much-needed awareness of a public health catastrophe. A useful primer on why America's treatment of raw sewage doesn't pass the smell test. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
