Videos:
- @Your Library – One Book One Region 2023 (Groton Public Library)
- Dr. Mona and Chelsea Clinton discuss the Flint Water Crisis
- Exposing the Flint water crisis
- Fighting for Safe Water in Flint
- Flint’s Fight for America’s Children
- How Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across a Lifetime (Nadine Burke Harris’s TedMed talk)
- In Flint, Public Trust Poisoned by Toxic Drinking Water Crisis
- The Legacy of the Flint Water Crisis
Podcasts:
- After Words, June 30, 2018 – Physician Mona Hanna-Attisha detailed her efforts to provide scientific evidence that children in Flint, Michigan, were being exposed to lead poisoning through the water supply. She’s interviewed by Senator Gary Peters (D-MI).
- The Politics Guys, July 17, 2018 – Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha on Politics, Lead, and the Flint Water Crisis – Mike Baranowski talks to Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha.
- Reveal, January 24, 2016 – Do Not Drink: The Water Crisis in Flint, Michigan.
- Sharon Kleyne Hour, February 15, 2016 – The Water Crisis in Flint, MI.
- So This Happened, January 21, 2016 – An inside look at the Flint water crisis and the latest on the 2016 campaign trail.
Discussion Guides:
For a What The Eyes Don’t See Discussion Guide and Common Read/One Read/Freshman Read inquiries, visit Penguin Random House Common Reads .
Additional What The Eyes Don’t See reader and teacher resources developed by Great Michigan Read, One Maryland One Book, and Reading Across Rhode Island.
Websites:
The Mesothelioma Center – There are an increasing number of ways that drinking water can become contaminated with asbestos and other toxins. It’s more important than ever to learn what regulations are in place to protect your health and what can be done to purify the water. https://www.asbestos.com/exposure/water-supply/
Cerebral Palsy Guide is a national support organization dedicated to educating individuals and their families about cerebral palsy and other developmental disabilities. We strive to provide answers and guidance to ensure that families receive the assistance they need to help improve their overall quality of life.
Consumernotice.org – Information on water contamination and the presence of PFAs in our local water sources provided by an organization that is dedicated to providing consumers with reliable health and safety information. Additional information about PFAS and lawsuits can be found at https://www.consumernotice.org/legal/pfas-lawsuit/.
Books on Related Themes for Adults:
(From the 2019 RI Center for the Book Resource Guide)
FICTION
Compiled by Cheryl Stein, Retired Librarian, Rogers Free Library
DRINKING WATER
Freezing Point by Karen Dionne
Salvation and annihilation meet at one degree. One man’s dream of providing
clean drinking water for millions, tapped from the polar ice, sparks a conflict of
humanity, science, big business, and environmental extremism. But no one can
foresee the true danger hidden deep within the ice, an enemy more deadly than
any could imagine, and an apocalyptic horror mankind may not survive.
Silent Justice by William Bernhardt
“I think we’re doing the right thing here. Not the smart thing. Certainly not the
safe thing. But the right thing.” Such is attorney Ben Kincaid’s assessment of the
case he has just taken on—despite his professional belief that the class action suit
is a suicide mission.
Kill Alex Cross by James Patterson
The President’s son and daughter are abducted, and Detective Alex Cross is one
of the first on the scene. But someone very high-up is using the FBI, Secret
Service, and CIA to keep him off the case and in the dark. Meanwhile, a deadly
contagion in the water supply cripples half of the capital, and Alex discovers that
someone may be about to unleash the most devastating attack the United States
has ever experienced.
FLINT, MICHIGAN
Moth to a Flame by Ashley Antoinette
In the little city of Flint, MI, the good die young and the people left standing are
the grimiest of characters. With reign over the city’s drug trade, Benjamin Atkins
made sure that his precious daughter, Raven, was secluded from the grit that the
city had to offer. But when Raven’s young heart gets claimed by Mizan, a stick-up
kid in search of a come-up, there’s nothing Benjamin can do about losing her to
the streets. She chooses love over loyalty and runs off with Mizan, but her new
role as wife soon proves to be more than she can handle.
ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS
The Fracking King by James Browning
The Fracking King follows Winston Crwth–a boarding-school kid, loner, and
Scrabble prodigy – who becomes an unlikely hero in the fight to stop fracking in
Pennsylvania.
Dead Sea: a Richard Mariner Adventure by Peter Tonkin
An ambitious ecological experiment plunges Richard and Robin Mariner in
deadly waters. Heritage Mariner and Greenbaum International have financed
an ecological experiment to prove how swiftly rubbish can foul the oceans by
dropping and tracking a plastic bottle into a Tokyo river.
MEDICAL ETHICS
Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel recounts the story of a Midwestern physician
who is forced to give up his profession due to the ignorance, corruption, and
greed of society.
Charlatans by Robin Cook
Newly minted chief resident at Boston Memorial Hospital Noah Rothauser is
swamped in his new position, from managing the surgical schedules to dealing
with the fallouts from patient deaths. Known for its medical advances, the famed
teaching hospital has fitted several ORs as “hybrid operating rooms of the future”
– an improvement that seems positive until an anesthesia error during a routine
procedure results in the death of an otherwise healthy man.
ACTIVISM
The Overstory: A Novel by Richard Powers
A novel of activism and natural-world power presents interlocking fables about
nine remarkable strangers who are summoned in different ways by trees for an
ultimate, brutal stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest.
Dissident Gardens : A Novel by Jonathan Lethem
An epic yet intimate family saga about three generations of all-American radicals
At the center of Jonathan Lethem’s superb new novel stand two extraordinary
Women.
NON-FICTION
Compiled by Maggie Browne, Deputy Director, North Kingstown Free Library
The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy by Anna
Clark
The Poisoned City recounts the gripping story of Flint’s poisoned water through
the people who caused it, suffered from it, and exposed it. It is a story of one
town, but could also be about any American city made precarious by the neglect
of infrastructure and the erosion of democratic decision-making.
Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City by Gordon Young
After living away for 15 years, journalist Gordon Young found himself missing
his hometown of Flint, Michigan. Hoping to rediscover and help a place that
once boasted one of the world’s highest per capita income levels, but is now one
of the country’s most impoverished and dangerous cities, he returned to Flint
with the intention of buying a house. What Young found was a place of stark
contrasts and dramatic stories.
the quickest route to neighborhood beautification.
Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint
and Beyond by Marc Lamont Hill
In this thought-provoking analysis of state-sanctioned violence, Marc Lamont
Hill carefully considers a string of high-profile deaths in America and incidents
of gross negligence by government, such as the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.
Hill digs underneath these events to uncover patterns and policies of authority
that allow some citizens become disempowered, disenfranchised, poor, uneducated,
exploited, vulnerable, and disposable.
Poison on Tap (A Bridge Magazine Analysis): How Government Failed Flint
and the Heroes Who Fought Back by the Staff of Bridge Magazine
Based on the award-winning journalism of Bridge Magazine, Poison on Tap
provides a riveting, authoritative, in-depth account of the government blunders,
mendacity and arrogance that produced the water crisis in Flint. This is a
compelling case study in how government at all levels can go very wrong—and
yet shows the power of the human spirit to overcome.
Real Impact: The New Economics of Social Change by Morgan Simon
Impact investment, the support of social and environmental projects with a
financial return, has become a hot topic in the world’s philanthropy and development
circles, and is growing exponentially: in the next decade, it is poised to eclipse
traditional aid by ten times. Yet for all the excitement, there is work to do to
ensure it actually realizes its potential. Will impact investment empower millions
of people worldwide, or will it just replicate the same failures that have plagued
the aid and antipoverty industry?
Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit
With Hope in the Dark, Solnit makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to
act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her
decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political
history, Solnit argues that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative
victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately
seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest
on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next.