December 2021 Reads

December saw the end of my semester teaching at Chatham University with two wonderful groups of students. On the immediate heels of submitting final grades, I had a total thyroidectomy at the Cleveland Clinic. Surgery was a bit more painful than expected but, mercifully, much of the scar and swelling are hidden by the collars of my softest t-shirts and, for when I have to dress up, I picked up a few new scarves at one of Cleveland’s really nice malls. I did not have to arrive at the hospital until 1:00pm on the day of surgery, so I had to do something to keep my mind (and apparently my credit card) occupied. In the process of recovering and preparing for a little getaway to the Homestead Resort for a few days before Christmas, I spent a lot of time curled up napping and reading in my recliner. We rang in the New Year with a feast of German cuisine prepared by one of my best friends, flipping between channels to try to find the least-bad New Year’s Eve coverage (it was all bad, turns out that headliners weren’t really interested in getting COVID).

Soul Full of Coal Dust: The True Story of an Epic Battle for Justice by Chris Hamby

In 2014, Chris Hamby won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for revealing how coal companies and law firms manipulated the system dedicated to compensating miners stricken with black lung because of their careers spent in the coalmines. Living in West Virginia, this is a painful topic. While the number of individuals employed by the mines in West Virginia is actually quite small, more folks work in healthcare, at Walmart, and even in higher education than in the mines, the culture of the state simply will not relinquish its tight grasp on coal mining. Heck, it will not even let other industries, like timbering or tourism, sit alongside coalmining. However, to speak negatively of the mines is to speak negatively of West Virginia, even if those mines have systematically abused those who have sacrificed everything for the purpose of running coal. Hamby follows the work of John Cline, who first arrived in West Virginia as part of the VISTA program, became a lay-representative for black lung claimants, and then ultimately earned his law degree to represent black lung claimants in court. Throughout his career, Cline came to work with and represent an array of characters who deserved so much better than the system they endured. Getting to know miners like Gary Fox in the text enlivened what would otherwise be a dry topic, effectively illustrating the stakes of the game the coal companies and law firms have played for decades. Reading this book reinforced to me how there were never any “good old days” of mining in West Virginia and it hurt to read how law firms, coal companies, and even some radiologists treated the lives of miners as merely disposable. This is one of the most compelling reads of the year for me.

The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell

During my semi-weekly commutes to Pittsburgh to teach at Chatham University, I listened to many audiobooks. I had never really listened to audiobooks before but I knew some other super-commuters and they all swore that audiobooks made the commutes so much easier. With some experience in this area now, I certainly agree. The Family Upstairs is the very last audiobook I “read” on my commute and even though I found the book to be pretty average, I was a little teary when I finished it while driving down the old Lincoln Highway in Forest Hills, PA. The book follows the life-changing events of Libby Jones as she discovers she has inherited an extremely valuable piece of property along the Thames in London on her 25th birthday. As she digs deeper into her past, it is as if petals of a rose gradually unfold as she discovers her true identity, the identity of her parents, and the strange circumstances that were seemingly held in suspended animation as her 25th birthday drew nearer.

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

If you are anxious or are in pain and wonder why your physicians are hesitant to prescribe opiates or benzodiazepines, it has something to do with the Sackler family. Other books, like Dreamland: The True Take of America’s Opiate Epidemic (which I read in September) effectively describe the situation as we have arrived, but Empire of Pain gets to the root and foundation of America’s addition problem. It turns out that in addition to being a physician (and honestly, a positive pioneer in the deinstitutionalization of thousands from large, state-run psychiatric facilities), Arthur Sackler was a marketing genius. Sackler parlayed his capabilities into the first big campaigns for “minor” tranquilizers like Valium and Librium, which established enormous financial security for his family and the pharmaceutical companies to which the Sacklers were tied. This enabled the second generation of Sacklers to, literally, make a killing on the development and sale of OxyContin.

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore

This is a gut-wrenching account of women seeking justice after their employers harmed them in the production of luminescent watch and clock faces. Radium was the secret ingredient to making these luminescent timepieces and, every day, dozens of women were putting small amounts of radium paint in their mouths hundreds of times a day. The women in the story initially felt isolated but eventually unified against their employers, even when it was the unpopular thing to do, to help pave the way for more humane and more contemporary laws to protect workers. It is just unfortunate that many of these women literally laid down and died for these changes to take effect. The author is not a scientist, reflected in some of the murky explanations about how radiation affects the body. However, it is still a very compelling story of the lives of a number of women impacted by this industry, whose pioneers and managers knew that radium could be harmful and instead kept that from the women who were quite literally falling apart.

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

While reading Crying in H Mart, I often felt like I was reading details and things so personal to the author that I was somehow interfering in the process of grieving and reconstructing her life after the passing of her mother. Despite the cultural differences, I think anyone with a strained parental relationship could strongly relate to Michelle’s narrative. Teenagers longing to be free from the parent or parents they struggle with and then, when it seems like there is no longer enough time, the lives collide again. The complicated baggage is still there, but despite the boundaries that kept things civil for a period of time, a more intimate relationship seems necessary and, in Michelle’s case, it yielded an opportunity to reflect and grow as a person (despite frequent disagreements and frustration with her parents and caretakers who emerged to help as her mother grew increasingly frail). It is a fairly short read, it feels so personal, but you emerge feeling like you have a new friend in the author.

Pick of the Month: December 2021

This month I took deep dives into industries that can kill. I found each of these three books (Soul Full of Coal Dust, Empire of Pain, and the Radium Girls) extremely compelling. However, after watching Harlan County, USA, which details the 1973, nearly yearlong strike at a Duke Energy mine in Kentucky, I have to hand it to Soul Full of Coal Dust this month. Furthermore, with the failure to pass a new infrastructure bill (e.g., Build Back Better), the fund that pays out black lung benefits will likely be insolvent sooner rather than later. The story in Soul Full of Coal Dust is that of an ongoing emergency that is soon to only get worse for those stricken with the condition and their loved ones.