The Poisoned City

May 28, 2018
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.

June 1, 2018
The story of the Flint, Michigan, water crisis.In 2014, the city of Flint--pop. 99,000, majority black--turned 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 heroes--e.g., persistent engineer Marc Edwards, journalist Curt Guyette, and NPR's Michigan Radio--and 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 crisis--captured nationally in images of bottled water being distributed to Flint's poor, the most severely affected--to 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.

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Starred review from June 1, 2018
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

June 1, 2018

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 Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2018

Detroit-based journalist Clark chronicles the poisoning of the Flint, MI, waters after the state government switched the city's water source and the 18 months it took to get officials to address the problem, by which time thousands of children had been exposed to life-damaging lead and 12 people had died.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.