The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town by Brian Alexander

American healthcare was an absurdist game of Jenga. 

~From The Hospital by Brian Alexander

The Hospital: Life, Death and Dollars in a Small American Town by Brian Alexander is the portrait of a Byran, Ohio hospital between 2018 and 2020. Alexander followed management, staff, and patients, investigating the complexities of healthcare in America in one small town. The news headlines we have all seen is presented in a personalized narrative that is deeply affecting; you want to rant, or cry. Likely both.

What America did have was a jumble of ill-fitting building blocks: the doctoring industry, the hospital industry, the insurance industry, the drug industry, the device industry. ~from The Hospital by Brian Alexander

Alexander follows the Bryan hospital's struggles to keep in the black when other small hospitals were being consolidated or put out of business by larger hospitals. And he shows how medical care has become a profit-making business. 

I was surprised to learn that deductibles were not always a part of health insurance. The rationale was that people would not abuse insurance if they had to pay a portion out of pocket. Affordable insurance comes with a high deductible, and people think twice before using it. Consequently, people go without preventative care and medications and treatment for illnesses. 

It could have been my family when we had to forward paid bills to the health care provider for reimbursement--after we met the deductible. Our baby suffered from continual ear and sinus infections and we often met the deductible by the end of January, which meant a huge decrease in available income for other bills and necessities at the start of every year.

The patients in the book exemplify the danger of skipping care. Those who can't afford medications pay a higher personal and economic cost when disease or illness progresses. Some pay with their lives, some become disabled and permanently lose jobs and income, and many are hopelessly mired in debt. 

Alexander writes that America has struggled with the crisis in medical care costs for a hundred years. Citizens resisted health insurance  a hundred years ago the way they resisted the Affordable Care Act later. Health insurance was, an is, considered unAmerican and socialist by some--even those who benefit from Medicare and other governmental programs.  

"Health...is a commodity which can be purchased," Alexander quotes the president of a utility company, and major employer, in 1929. "The difficulty now is its cost is beyond the reach of a great majority of people." 

Almost a hundred years later, it remains true.

In 1963, my dad sold the business his father had built in Tonawanda, NY, and came to Detroit to look for work in the auto industry. Mom had an autoimmune disease. They needed health insurance. My folks were very lucky. They went from struggling to a nice home, two cars, health insurance to treat mom's crippling rheumatoid arthritis and, later, dad's non-Hodgkins lymphoma, plus my folks paid for my first two years of college.

Today, my son has to purchase his own health insurance. He has to invest his own money in a retirement account. Of course, he has school loans, too. 

We have gone backwards. 

Alexander touched on Michigan hospitals, like William Beaumont Hospital, the Royal Oak, Michigan based hospital where my parents and grandparents were treated. A few years back they tore down an the aging shopping center of my youth and built a new one. It did seem strange to me that a hospital was in real estate. When Covid-19 hit and Michigan went into lockdown, hospitals lost elective surgery patients. Like my husband, who was considering shoulder replacement surgery a year ago. Beaumont laid off thousands and eliminated 450 jobs. During a pandemic. 

The book brought back a lot of memories of our seven years living along the Michigan-Ohio border. I had been to the towns Brian Alexander writes about.  

After fifteen years living in Philadelphia, we moved back to Michigan so our son could grow up knowing his extended family. Neither of us had lived in a small town before. There were under 9,000 people in Hillsdale, and about 40,000 in the entire county. There was a turnover of doctors; our first family doctor, one of the few who delivered babies, left family practice, demoralized after lawsuits. We did have a small hospital at the end of our street. When our son was three, he came down with pneumonia and we were glad the hospital was so close. 

Small town life was an adjustment. We left a racially eclectic city neighborhood for a county with five African Americans; one was my ob/gyn, one his nurse wife, and one his daughter who was in my son's class in grade school. I was surprised by rural poverty. Our son told us that half his kindergarten class did not have a phone and most had no books in their homes. We took took day trips antiquing in small Ohio towns like Pioneer and I took my Bernina sewing machine for cleaning in Bryan, OH. 

I am pleased that the publisher offered me a free egalley in exchange for a fair review. I found this to be an immersive, thought-provoking book.

read an excerpt at https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250237354

The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town
by Brian Alexander
St. Martin's Press
Pub Date March 9, 2021 
ISBN: 9781250237354
hardcover $28.99 (USD)

from the publisher

An intimate, heart wrenching portrait of one small hospital that reveals the magnitude of America’s health care crises.

“With his signature gut-punching prose, Alexander breaks our hearts as he opens our eyes to America’s deep-rooted sickness and despair by immersing us in the lives of a small town hospital and the people it serves. “ —Beth Macy, bestselling author of Dopesick

By following the struggle for survival of one small-town hospital, and the patients who walk, or are carried, through its doors, The Hospital takes readers into the world of the American medical industry in a way no book has done before. Americans are dying sooner, and living in poorer health. Alexander argues that no plan will solve America’s health crisis until the deeper causes of that crisis are addressed.

Bryan, Ohio's hospital, is losing money, making it vulnerable to big health systems seeking domination and Phil Ennen, CEO, has been fighting to preserve its independence. Meanwhile, Bryan, a town of 8,500 people in Ohio’s northwest corner, is still trying to recover from the Great Recession. As local leaders struggle to address the town’s problems, and the hospital fights for its life amid a rapidly consolidating medical and hospital industry, a 39-year-old diabetic literally fights for his limbs, and a 55-year-old contractor lies dying in the emergency room. With these and other stories, Alexander strips away the wonkiness of policy to reveal Americans’ struggle for health against a powerful system that’s stacked against them, but yet so fragile it blows apart when the pandemic hits. Culminating with COVID-19, this book offers a blueprint for how we created the crisis we're in.

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive by Stephanie Land

"Poverty was like a stagnant pool of mud that pulled at our feet and refused to let go." from Maid by Stephanie Land

I'll be brutally honest, and you can "unfollow" me if you want, I don't care, but ever since Presidents Roosevelt and Johnson created social programs to help the poor there have been politicians determined to slash, limit, and end them. And one of their methods is to vilify the poor as blood-sucking, lazy, ignorant, "self-entitled" criminals who live off the hard earned tax dollars squeezed from hard-working, honest, salt-of-the-earth, red-blooded Americans.

I have known some of "those people," and yes, they sometimes made bad choices, but they also worked to improve their lives. Like my cousin who ran away at sixteen and returned, pregnant, without a high school degree. She was on welfare and food stamps. She also got a GED and learned to drive and found a job...which was eliminated by budget cuts. After floundering for some time, she found work again, and even love. Then died young of a horrible autoimmune disease.

Or the couple who worked abroad to teach English as a second language to pay off their school debts, then returned to America and could not find jobs. The wife returned to school for an advanced degree. She graduated after the economy tanked and still could not find work in her area. They relied on WIC when their child was born. They have lived in poverty their entire marriage, the woman working for ETS and online tutoring.

Stephanie Land had dreams, hoping some day to go to college. Her parents had split up, her mom's husband resentful and her dad broke because of the recession. She was self-supporting when she became pregnant. When she decided to keep her baby her boyfriend became abusive. She was driven to take her daughter and leave him. 

And so began her descent into the world of homelessness, poverty, the red-tape web of government programs. She worked as a maid, even though she suffered from a pinched nerve and back pain and allergies. The pay was miserable, her travel expenses uncovered. She found housing that was inadequate, unsafe, and unhealthy. Black mold kept her daughter perpetually sick with sinus and ear infections.

I know about that. Our infant son was ill most of the year with allergies, sinus infections, ad ear infections. It made him fussy and overactive and every time he was sick it made his development lag. We were lucky. We could address the environmental causes. We found a specialist who treated him throughout his childhood.

Maid is Stephanie Land's story of those years when she struggled to provide for her daughter. She documents how hard it is to obtain assistance and even the knowledge of what aid is available, the everlasting exhaustion of having to work full time, taking her daughter to and from daycare, and raise her child on a razor-thin budget. All while cleaning the large homes of strangers.

And that is the other side of the book, the people who hire help at less than minimum wage, some who show consideration and others who like her invisible. How a maid knows more about her clients than they can imagine. 

Land worked hard. Really hard. She had to. Finally, she was able to go to school and write this book. She crawled out of the mire. What is amazing is that anyone can escape poverty. You earn a few dollars more and you lose benefits. 

Land is an excellent writer. She created scenes that broke my heart, such as when her mother and her new husband come to help Land move. Her mom suggests they go out to lunch, then expects Land to pay for the meal. Land had $10 left until the end of the month. Even knowing this, they accepted it. Then, her mom's husband complained Land acted 'entitled'. I was so angry! I felt heartbroken that Land and her daughter were shown so little charity. 

I think about the Universal Basic Income idea that I have read about. How if Land received $1,000 a month she would have been able to provide her daughter with quality daycare or healthy housing. She would have been able to spend more time on her degree and work fewer weekends. She would have been off government assistance years sooner.

But that's not how the system works. Because we don't trust poor people to do the right thing. We don't trust them to want to have a better life. We don't believe they are willing to work hard--work at all.

Remember The Ghost of Christmas Present who shows Scrooge the children hiding under his robes, Ignorance and

Want? We have the power to end ignorance and want. We choose not to. Instead, we tell people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, even when they are without shoes.

That's my rant. Yes, progressive liberal stuff. But also in the spirit of the Christ who told us that if we have two shirts, give one to the poor. The Christ who said not to judge other's faults and ignore your larger ones--judging being the larger one. The Christ who taught mercy to strangers. 

Perhaps Land's memoir will make people take a second look at mothers on assistance. Under the cinders is a princess striving to blossom. 

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive

by Stephanie Land

Hachette Books

Pub Date 22 Jan 2019 

ISBN 9780316505116

PRICE $27.00 (USD)

Marlena by Julie Buntin

As a girl, I'd had a friend who died. We were close. I didn't talk about it. When you grow up, who you were as a teenager either takes on a mythical importance or its completely laughable. I wanted to be the kind of person who wipes those years way; instead, I feared, they defined me. from Marlena by Julie Buntin

After reading Ohio by Stephen Markley and Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell, books about Midwest small towns, drugs, abuse, and growing up, I decided it was the right time to read Julie Buntin's Marlena. The novel focuses on Marlena, a teenage girl in Northern Michigan caught in a web of poverty and drugs, and the lasting impact Marlena had on the narrator, Cat.

Buntin's novel caught so many things for me. The painful nostalgia for a moment in time, the haunting loss of a loved one, how in youth our naivety blinds us to darker realities.

I want to go home--a phrase that's stuck on a loop, that I hear before falling asleep, waiting in line for my coffee, tapping at the elevator button and rising through the sky to my apartment, worrying the words like a lucky stone, and yet my desire is not attached to a particular places--not to Silver Lake, not to Marlena, not to Mom or Dad or Jimmy. I want to go home, I want to go home, but what I mean, what I'm grasping for, is not a place, it's a feeling. I want to go back. But back where? from Marlena by Julie Buntin

The narrator, Cat, is living in New York City with a good job and a loving husband. She is an alcoholic. Cat tells the story of being the new girl in a small Up North town, looking for a new best friend. She develops a girl crush on a charismatic and beautiful older teen who lives next door. Cat, fifteen, wants to be like Marlena--cool, daring, exciting, experienced.

After her dad left them, Cat's mom moved the family from Pontiac to her childhood vacation spot, Silver Lake. Silver Lake is a half hour away from the school and Walmart and the nearest mall is ninety miles downstate. It is also down the road from the mansions along Lake Michigan where the 1% come to play, and a historic, elite Methodist enclave. Cat's mom has a drinking problem and with no job skills is lucky to get a job cleaning a summer estate.

Catherine had been on scholarship at a private school, a good student, college-bound, a bookish loner. Her older brother walked away from a college scholarship to help take care of his mom. Moving is a chance to reinvent herself as Cat, an edgier and more risk-taking girl.

Marlena's mom disappeared years back and her addict dad has a meth lab in the woods. Marlena cares for her younger brother as best she can, but he is often alone with no food in the house. Already at seventeen Marlena is an alcoholic, she trades sexual favors to obtain drugs, and although smart she skips school.

For eight brief months, Cat became a part of Marlena and her world-- the 'best days ever'-- with a group of friends who accepted her, her life with filled danger and excitement.

****

By July we, like twenty percent of Michigan's population--Mom loved that statistic--were on food stamps. from Marlena by Julie Buntin

Michigan ranks 4th in the country for drug problems, with heroin and cocaine in Detroit and opioids everywhere else. An estimated 20% of Michigan adults drink to excess and 24% of young men are binge drinkers. Beer is everywhere; the state ranks number 10 in the number of IPA breweries in the country.

The Pere Marquette River in Baldwin, Lakes County, the poorest county in Michigan

Michigan has its urban centers mired in job loss and poverty, the racist legacy of redlining and 'urban renewal' with its wholesale destruction of African American neighborhoods. Pontiac, Cat's hometown before they move to Silver Lake, has a poverty rate of 34%.

But the rural Up North communities also are impoverished. I just returned from a trip to Lake, Roscommon, and Ogemaw Counties with poverty rates over 28%, higher than the state average of 24%. Michigan ranks as one of the worst six states in the nation for the number of children living in poverty--one in five.

There are also pockets of great wealth located in Oakland County where I live, including Bloomfield Hills, one of the top 20 richest cities in the country.

Meadowbrook Hall, the second largest private home in America, built in Oakland Co, MI by the heir to the Dodge fortune

The city where my grandparents lived in the 1960s is now one of the ten wealthiest cities in the state, where I grew up is number 15, and my current city is number 30. These suburbs were built to house workers in the auto industry, from the top brass to the union workers like my dad. Their playground became the small 'Up North' towns--modest cabins for the middle class, posh resort homes and yachts in a marina for the 1%.

My dad's cabin

These remote villages and towns became dependant on tourism, the hunters and fishers and snowmobilers and skiers and family vacationers. So that side by side, for a few weeks each year, the very wealthy live amongst the local poor. And then the economy plummeted, and the working and middle classes could not afford the cabins and vacations Up North.

Summertime transformed northern Michigan. Kewaunee swelled to twice its normal size. from Marlena by Julie Buntin

Pentwater Lake

We spent two years in a resort community on Lake Michigan. Between July 1 and the end of August the town was filled with campers at the state park and the Methodist campground, cottagers, bed and breakfast tourists, and people living on their sailboats in the marina. At summer's end, everything closed. Anyone who had enough money left town for their winter homes in Texas or Arizona or Florida or even Metro Detroit. Several bars were open, and the bank and post office. The one grocery store that catered to the marina kept half the store open for basics. In winter 193 inches of snow fell.

Years before we lived there, we used to go to the Methodist family camp. We were impressed by the beauty of the lake and marina, the channel feeding into Lake Michigan with its gorgeous sand beaches.

The beach at Pentwater

One day when I was in town checking out the tourist shops and ice cream parlors I remarked to a teenager that it must be a beautiful place to live. He scowled in answer. It wasn't until we lived there that I realized how isolated and boring a place it had to be to grow up in. Graduation class sizes were in the teens, the entire K-12 school system had about 260 students.

Lake Michigan at Pentwater

When we left Philadelphia when our son was two I thought a small town would be a wonderful place to raise our son. It turns out that Mayberry doesn't exist. Maybe it never did exist.

*****

As I read Marlena I wondered how much I had missed, all the different places we had moved and stayed a few years, never really understanding the community that deeply. I worked with teens but what did I know about their lives? One boy in the inner city of Philadelphia told me I did not understand real life. Pacifism did not work on the streets where one didn't get mad, one got even. In a small rural town, our son would ask why classmates could not read, had no telephones or books at home, or why their dads were in jail.

I remembered 'my' Marlena, a gregarious and confident girl from a well-to-do family who took the 14-year-old me under her wing--I was the new girl in school--and encouraged me to be outgoing, lose weight, have fun. She dropped me, age 15, and a year later I saw her going through the school hallway, her books held close against her chest, eyes straight ahead, slightly leaning forward in a fast walk. She put purple chalk on her eyelids in the restroom before school. She had changed. Years later I stopped by her home. Her brother told me she had married three times and lived in an Up North small town; her mother didn't remember which one, but it started with an M.

Cat is filled with nostalgia for that moment in time when she first felt alive and a part of something. And she is filled with survivor's guilt and regret. She struggles with alcoholism which might destroy the life she has built. What she experienced was horrendous; she saw the destruction of a smart and beautiful and courageous girl, a girl she wanted to be.

Just one girl, one fictional girl.

How many thousands across Michigan are we losing today? To human trafficking. To opioid addiction, meth, heroin, alcohol. To poverty, sexual abuse... How many across the country, the world?

What impressed me about Marlena was the story and the voice and the Michigan places and the heartbreaking REALNESS of it all. I am glad I finally read it.

I Can't Breathe: The Racism of the Justice System

"A masterly narrative of urban America and a scathing indictment of the perverse incentives built into our penal system, I Can’t Breathe drills down into the particulars of one case to confront us with the human cost of our broken approach to dispensing criminal justice." from the publisher's website

Taibbi's book I Can't Breathe explains the evolution of discrimination justified by being 'tough on crime' and how it lead to the death of Eric Garner, which fueled the Black Lives Matter movement.

Random House sent me an email offering pre-approval to read I Can't Breathe by Matt Taibbi. I downloaded the book to check it out, and realized it was the perfect book to build upon other recent reads about justice and race, including Just Mercy by Bryon Stevenson, Detroit: 1967, Reading with Patrick by Michelle Kuo, and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

I had acquired a basic understanding that the justice system was inherently racist. Taibbi's thorough consideration of the death of Eric Garner explained the political and social pressures that changed police culture after overt institutional racism was pushed underground.

Taibbi presents a balanced portrait of a beloved family man who was deeply flawed, as we all are, but whom Taibbi came to truly like. Readers will connect to Eric, a bigger than life, eccentric character. Unemployable because of a prior conviction, Eric supports his family by creating a business selling 'loosies', black market cigarettes smuggled in from states with lower cigarette taxes and sold individually. Eric is jailed and fined over and over. 

When Americans became worried about crime during the tumultuous 1970s politicians began offering promises to be 'tough on crime.' White Americans were afraid of urban African Americans. 

In the 1990s, New York City led the way by pushing for increased arrests. Cops were to stop and frisk first to see if they could turn up anything to justify an arrest! People were targeted by color, attire, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, reaching for their pocket--but the real motivation was racism. Blacks and Hispanics in high-crime neighborhoods were targeted.

Cops publicly humiliated their victims by public cavity searches and the use of unnecessary brute force was common. The system protected the cops.

Garner stood out. He was big, he wore clothes that were literally falling apart, and he stood in the same place day after day. He had asthma. He had been looking poorly and was tired. He was robbed and beaten up, financially always struggling to support his family. 

Garner was an easy catch for a cop who needed to meet his quota. He was stopped and searched hundreds of times and when cops discovered a few packs of cigarettes  he would be arrested and his money confiscated.

Garner's son had just earned a scholarship to college, and Garner was the father of a new baby when he broke up a street fight. Cops who had been watching the fight arrested Garner even though he had not sold a cigarette all morning. Ramsey Orta saw the arrest and filmed it with his cellphone. When Garner countered that he had not done anything wrong and was not going to be arrested that day, four officers went after Garner and pushed him to the ground.

"I can't breathe," he said over and over. And then he stopped breathing and the cops did nothing. 

Taibbi put Garner's death in perspective of how policing changed: instituting 'reasonable' suspicion as a validating a stop and frisk; the adoption of "Broken Windows" and the emphasis on policing as keeping 'order', creating a 'goal setting' culture; zero-tolerance policing and 'predictive policing'. 

Groups rose up to challenge the discriminatory methods but had little success. Eric's daughter Erica Garner worked for justice for her father. Bureaucracy protected the cops and left the families of victims without justice. Orta's cell phone video made him a police target. Politicians got involved for personal attention. Protest groups arose demanding justice, including Black Lives Matter.

I am disgusted by how often I hear people counter Black Lives Matter with "all lives matter." That is true, but not all 'lives' are targeted because of color or where they live.

A few years back I visited a college friend living in Detroit. Driving home I was lost and tense. When I got to an overpass with no cars I sped up a bit and was pulled over by a cop.

The cop said, "don't say anything," and took my driver's license. He came back and said, "I will write this up so you don't have it on your record, but you will pay a fine." I wondered then what it was that caused him to do this? My clean driving record? And today I wonder, if I were a person of color, would he have searched my car and person looking for evidence to arrest me?

I have never felt so protected and cushioned by the accident of my color as I have after reading I Can't Breathe.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street
Matt Taibbi
Random House
Publication Date: October 24, 2017
Hardcover $28.00
ISBN: 9780812988840

When I opened my Ocober 2017 issue of Quilting Arts I came across Chawn Kimber's amazing quilt dedicated to Eric Garner, "The One for Eric G."

Kimber, Chawne. The One for Eric G. 2015. From Michigan State University Museum, Michigan State University Museum Collection. Published in The Quilt Index, http://www2.matrix.msu.edu/~quilti/fulldisplay.php?kid=1E-3D-2932.
Accessed: 09/18/2017

Find out more about Chawne's art at
https://cauchycomplete.wordpress.com/quilt-gallery/

I Can't Breathe by Matt Taibbi

"A masterly narrative of urban America and a scathing indictment of the perverse incentives built into our penal system, I Can’t Breathe drills down into the particulars of one case to confront us with the human cost of our broken approach to dispensing criminal justice." from the publisher's website

Taibbi's book I Can't Breathe explains the evolution of discrimination justified by being 'tough on crime' and how it led to the death of Eric Garner, which fueled the Black Lives Matter movement.

Random House sent me an email offering pre-approval to read I Can't Breathe by Matt Taibbi. I downloaded the book to check it out, and realized it was the perfect book to build upon other recent reads about justice and race, including Just Mercy by Bryon Stevenson, Detroit: 1967, Reading with Patrick by Michelle Kuo, and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

I had acquired a basic understanding that the justice system was inherently racist. Taibbi's thorough consideration of the death of Eric Garner explained the political and social pressures that changed police culture after overt institutional racism was pushed underground.

Taibbi presents a balanced portrait of a beloved family man who was deeply flawed, as we all are, but whom Taibbi came to truly like. Readers will connect to Eric, a bigger than life, eccentric character. Unemployable because of a prior conviction, Eric supports his family by creating a business selling 'loosies', black market cigarettes smuggled in from states with lower cigarette taxes and sold individually. Eric is jailed and fined over and over. 

When Americans became worried about crime during the tumultuous 1970s politicians began offering promises to be 'tough on crime.' White Americans were afraid of urban African Americans. 

In the 1990s, New York City led the way by pushing for increased arrests. Cops were to stop and frisk first to see if they could turn up anything to justify an arrest! People were targeted by color, attire, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, reaching for their pocket--but the real motivation was racism. Blacks and Hispanics in high-crime neighborhoods were targeted.

Cops publicly humiliated their victims by public cavity searches and the use of unnecessary brute force was common. The system protected the cops.

Garner stood out. He was big, he wore clothes that were literally falling apart, and he stood in the same place day after day. He had asthma. He had been looking poorly and was tired. He was robbed and beaten up, financially always struggling to support his family. 

Garner was an easy catch for a cop who needed to meet his quota. He was stopped and searched hundreds of times and when cops discovered a few packs of cigarettes discovered he would be arrested and his money confiscated.

Garner's son had just earned a scholarship to college, and Garner was the father of a new baby when he broke up a street fight. Cops who had been watching the fight arrested Garner even though he had not sold a cigarette all morning. Ramsey Orta saw the arrest and filmed it with his cellphone. When Garner countered that he had not done anything wrong and was not going to be arrested that day, four officers went after Garner and pushed him to the ground.

"I can't breathe," he said over and over. And then he stopped breathing and the cops did nothing. 

Taibbi put Garner's death in perspective of how policing changed: instituting 'reasonable' suspicion as a validating a stop and frisk; the adoption of "Broken Windows" and the emphasis on policing as keeping 'order', creating a 'goal setting' culture; zero-tolerance policing and 'predictive policing'. 

Groups rose up to challenge the discriminatory methods but had little success. Eric's daughter Erica Garner worked for justice for her father. Bureaucracy protected the cops and left the families of victims without justice. Orta's cell phone video made him a police target. Politicians got involved for personal attention. Protest groups arose demanding justice, including Black Lives Matter.

I am disgusted by how often I hear people counter Black Lives Matter with "all lives matter." That is true, but not all 'lives' are targeted because of color or where they live.

A few years back I visited a college friend living in Detroit. Driving home I was lost and tense. When I got to an overpass with no cars I sped up a bit and was pulled over by a cop.

The cop said, "don't say anything," and took my driver's license. He came back and said, "I will write this up so you don't have it on your record, but you will pay a fine." I wondered then what it was that caused him to do this? My clean driving record? And today I wonder, if I were a person of color, would he have searched my car and person looking for evidence to arrest me?

I have never felt so protected and cushioned by the accident of my color as I have after reading I Can't Breathe.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street
Matt Taibbi
Random House
Publication Date: October 24, 2017
Hardcover $28.00
ISBN: 9780812988840

Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout: Hope for the Hopeless

"But this was life! And it was messy!"

After Elizabeth Strout wrote My Name is Lucy Barton she was moved to tell the stories of the hometown characters Lucy and her mother had talked about, resulting in Anything is Possible.

In Strout's prize-winning book Olive Kitteridge each character is touched by Olive; in Anything is Possible it is Lucy Barton who provides the context for each story.

The suffering behind the stories made my heart ache. Poverty, abuse, deep loneliness, and loveless lives have left their marks on these characters. And yet--and yet--their resilience is rewarded with moments of grace, a nod of understanding, friendship offered unexpected--the small gifts that shed a ray of hope that life can be different.

As I was reading Strout I was also reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. I noted similarities between the books: crushing childhood poverty, resilience, and an understanding that being truthful about life isn't pretty.

Lucy's sister Vicky asks Lucy why she doesn't write the truth of what happened to their family. Who'd want to read that story? their brother Pete asks. I would, Vicky replies. I was reminded of a scene from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn where Francie's teacher tells Francie to write pretty stories, not stories about drunkenness and poverty, the stories of Francie's real life. The question always is, do writers tell the truth or 'pretty' life up? Strout has decided that life is messy, and yet, as Pete tells Vicky, we don't turn out so bad in spite of it.

It is Strout's honesty that is unsettling and moving. By entering these character's lives we learn compassion. We walk in their shoes for a while and they become more than a recluse, or a fat lady, or the poor kids who ate from dumpsters.

The best part is the compassion these characters have for each other. Lucy's brother Pete remarks that their mother 'just wasn't made right,' and Lucy agrees but adds, "She had grit. She hung in there."

At a time when Americans are trying to understand the force behind popularism and the political climate, we are turning to literature to understand the experiences of those who are from different backgrounds. Forget some of the over-marketed best sellers. Read Strout.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Anything is Possible
Elizabeth Strout
Random House
Publication date: April 25, 2017
$27 hardcover
ISBN: 9780812989403

"Radiant...Class prejudice remains one of Strout's enduring themes along with the complex, fraught bonds of family across the generations...Another powerful examination of painfully human ambiguities and ambivalences--this gifted writer just keeps getting better." Kirkus Reviews

Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman: Imagining a Better World

We have lost our vision, Rutger Bregman writes, mired in old paradigms and blind to the possibilities we should be imagining. We could be realizing the world predicted by 20th c thinkers.

Subtitled "How We Can Build The Ideal World," Utopia for Realists is an international best seller, first published in the Netherlands where it ignited a debate and inspired a movement.

Bregman begins by reminding us of how recently life was a "vale of tears," "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," as philosophers wrote in the 16th c. With the explosion of new technology and prosperity over the last two hundred years, humanity has achieved a standard of living that Medieval folk would consider Utopia; indoor heat and cooling, flush toilets and clean water alone would make them marvel. So would obesity from an overabundance of easily obtained food, the magical ability to protect ourselves from smallpox and polio, and paved roads we travel at 70 mph--without fear of highwaymen robberies.

Have we reached Utopia? Or is there something we can do to make life even better? How can we solve the problems that remain: fearfulness, unemployment, quality of life, poverty.

The welfare state 'from a bygone era' doesn't work today. Globalization and the cost of higher education have impacted the stability of the Middle Class. Upward mobility for the poor no longer happens.

Bregman wants to "fling open the windows of our minds" to discover "a new lodestar." He presents studies and experiments about how we treat the homeless and the poor and challenges our traditional mindset that people are to be blamed for their own poverty--they just have to work hard and save. We have created welfare programs for those in need, which are costly and do not solve the basic problem. What happened to the expectation of the 15-hour workweek? Why are we spending more time working, impacting our health and our families?

Bregman wants us to dream new dreams and embrace ideas that can change the world for the better. Thinking outside the box has made a difference: abolition, universal voting rights, and same-sex marriage, he reminds, were all once considered impossible. All it takes is "a single opposing voice.

The basis of Bregman's new Utopia is a guaranteed basic income. He presents studies that demonstrate the success of such programs. In 1967 universal basic income was supported by 80% of Americans and President Nixon submitted a bill to eradicate poverty.

Other changes he offers include shorter work hours, proven to increase productivity, reconsidering the importance of the Gross Domestic Product as our economic standard of success, improving quality of life, open borders, taxing capital instead of labor, and adjusting salary to a job's societal value. At a time when productivity is a record levels, there are fewer jobs and lower salaries. "We have to devise a system to ensure that everybody benefits," he writes.

There is an old saying: Insanity is doing the same thing over and expecting different results. Instead of holding more tightly to the old ways we need to envision innovation. Perhaps books like this will spur discussions and reevaluations.

One can only hope.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Bregman's TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIL_Y9g7Tg0

Utopia for Realists
Rutger Bregman
Little, Brown & Co.
$27 hardcover
ISBN:9780316471893