Category: What I’m Reading

After reading Hamilton, I decided to take a break on non-fiction and work on a novel. This year, Penn State Harrisburg is reading Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You. This is an engrossing read. I read it in two weeks. The book covers the gamut – racism, sexism, bullying, and more – in a way that makes you feel the feelings of the characters. 

As a parent, the book grabbed my emotions from the very beginning: a  young girl is missing and then found drowned in a lake near her home. The rest of the book reconstructs the long and short histories that got her, and her family, to that moment. The book starts slow, as it builds the back story of the girl’s interracial parents. Her father is Chinese and her mother is white. Set in the 1970s – meaning their budding relationship was in the 1960s – this simple fact structures much of the conflict in the story. Her father lived the emotional abuse of being a minority in the United States. Her mother dealt with sexism as she tried to make her way in a “man’s world” of medicine. Or at least, in the preparation for entering that world, a dream that would be stunted. As the book progresses, the reader comes to understand why so many things are never said among the family of five (the girl has an older brother and younger sister). Each experiences their own forms of discrimination, but they do not fully understand the experiences of the others. Ng’s prose makes their personal feelings palpable for the reader.

I was left with a lot of questions about my own life and family. What are the things that I do not say? Both those hidden feelings of love and bitterness. The unsaid caused massive harm to this family, though they also paid the price for how the unsaid was revealed, with so many assumptions being wrong. What things do I say to my boys that undermine their self-confidence and scramble the message of how much I love them? And most hauntingly, how is my partnership like the clutch and gas pedal analogy in the book? The relationship of the husband and wife reveals a partnership where one necessarily diminished so the other could rise. I have that in my marriage. My wife gave up a lot professionally to be with our boys. It is a wonderful thing in many respects, but there is much loss there. A loss that I desperately want to make up, but it is not that easy. We are not the only academic couple that has navigated these challenges and Ng’s book brings the experiences of both partners, with all of their complex emotions, to the fore. I bet there are questions in this book for you to ponder.

This winter break I decided to tackle Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton. To be honest, this read was inspired by my immense enjoyment of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical. I had known about the musical for years, but had not listened to it until spring of 2020. After listening to it constantly when we were on lock down for COVID, I jumped at the opportunity to watch the musical on Disney+ last summer. I love musicals, and Hamilton joins my list of top favorites that include Rent, Les Miserables, and Phantom of the Opera. I have enjoyed many more, but those are the top. 

Digging into the background of the musical, I knew that much artistic license was taken by Miranda to make the remarkable story of this often obscure founding father fit into a two hour show. I am not going to recap all of those differences or critique the musical, many of those choices make total sense given the challenge of balancing detail with length. The choices also serve to play up the relationship between Burr and Hamilton.

What struck me most when reading this biography was how well the musical captures the tone of Hamilton’s life. I have seen people post that their preferred act differs based on their mood. When in a good mood, the peppy and exciting Act I is on point. When pensive or sad, the melancholy and dark Act II makes sense. While Hamilton’s early life is full of much sadness, his glory days during the Revolution and as the first Treasury Secretary were captivating to read. Then, his life turned darker. A string of bad decisions, starting with the Reynolds pamphlet and ending with his foolish duel with Burr, made reading about the later portion of his life more difficult.

Hamilton was undoubtedly a genius of his time. His early death (compared to the other founders) robbed the country of much brilliance. He was also, as Miranda clearly picks up on, a poster for the American dream. While he struggled with the shadows of his upbringing (bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman…), his brain and tenacity took him to the heights of power in early America. He found a firm position among wealthier and landed peers like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. But, his fall from grace and power were driven by the dark side of his talents, ambitions, and insecurities.

This is a great read for developing a more nuanced view of the Founders, particularly this currently popular, but not well understood, Father.

I recently finished reading Harriet Washington’s haunting and devastating account of America’s history of racism in medical treatment and research, Medical Apartheid. I came across this book on several anti-racism reading lists and assigned the introduction in my health policy seminar this semester. The topic of this book has come up over and over again throughout the pandemic. Much has been written about the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on communities of color, as well as resistance in black and latino communities to participating in vaccine trials and getting the eventual vaccine. This book lays out the deep history of medical abuse that undergirds that resistance and suspicion. It is to the American healthcare system what Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow has been to the American criminal justice system.

Washington’s history traces a throughline of the abuse of black bodies in America; from excruciating experiments on slaves through displays of the “exotic,” government testing of the effects of radiation exposure and biological weapons (Carver Village), prison experiments, drug studies on children, genetics research, AIDS research, and much more. A major aspect of this throughline is the lack of informed consent and voluntary participation, up through the present. She spends some time in the epilogue making recommendations for further improving research practices – including paying more attention to upholding human subjects protections and therapeutic treatment for participants in studies conducted in Africa (e.g., ANTICOV), mandatory participant education, participants serving on institutional review boards, and protecting participants who cannot consent to research (e.g., studies done in emergency rooms). Washington balances these recommendations with encouragement for African Americans to engage in clinical research, though doing so after warily evaluating it for necessary research protections. The current vaccine push and evaluation of therapeutics for COVID-19 are good examples of the societal cost for low participation.

This book is a must read for doctors and researchers in training. It could be a powerful tool for discussing human subjects protections in research courses. It is also vital background for understanding the understandable reticence of communities of color to participate in needed medical research.

Wow, what to disparate topics for one blog post! This is really a What Am I Reading post that is a long time in coming. I have not been reflection on this site about all of the reading that I did this past year, but I did want to post on these two books. The first ended up being highly personal and the second is a recommended read.

When I added Anthony Lubrano’s Limbo: Blue Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams to my reading list, I did not know how personally meaningful it was going to be. The essence of this book is Lubrano’s exploration of straddlers. They are the millions of us that live in a white collar world, but have blue collar roots. Writing about this today feels appropriate since this week is a national celebration of first generation students. Before reading this book, I did not have a vocabulary for why I often feel uncomfortable in academia. I often do not feel like I fit as I navigate this career. This is not to say that I do not have privilege, I am a white, straight, cis-gendered academic, so I do. But that privilege does not totally overcome the discomfort of my blue collar roots. Like Lubrano’s other straddlers, my education makes it tougher to fit in with other blue collar folks (even though I can still speak the language), but I also still do not get all of the hidden curriculum of white collar work. 

My mom was an administrative assistant at Armstrong World Industries for her entire working life. This was a white collar world, but she had a high school education. That did not stop her from becoming indispensable to every boss that she worked for, but it also didn’t make her management. My dad transitioned into a white collar job after a major heart attack and ample stresses put a damper on his self-employment in construction. So to some extent my parents were the straddlers, but they did not navigate higher education. That was left to me. I have wondered what my dad would think about what I do now. Whether he would understand it and me. He has been gone for almost 22 years (the heart disease caught up with him). My mom was proud, but I also found myself more distant from her as I kept advancing in my education. Of course, that was just as much her as me, but that is a story for another time. She would have done so well in college, but that opportunity was not open for her.

I will never forget my first summer of teaching while in grad school. I wore shorts and a polo every day and regularly received passive-aggressive admonishment from one of our tenured professors. That has stuck with me as I still find any excuse to not dress up for work. The white collar remains uncomfortable, even as I work to find my way in that world.

If this is you too, I highly recommend this book. There is so much more than I can share in a short post.

The second book that I wanted to briefly blog about is Carol Anderson’s White Rage. It is one of many books that I have been working on in the wake of George Floyd’s death. That and a personal situation with a student has helped to jolt me out of nice white complacency into a place of appropriate discomfort. This is not to pat myself on the back. I cannot say I have arrived at being anti-racist, but I am trying to do the work. There are numerous lists out there for books to read on racism and anti-racism and Anderson’s commonly appears on that list. I would also recommend Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power, both of which I read this summer. I would also recommend Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, which I read a few years ago.

Anderson’s White Rage succinctly and powerfully documents the backlash of white rage that has followed each successive major advancement in African American rights in the United States. Jim Crow ended Reconstruction following the end of slavery and brief attainment of full rights by African Americans. Racially “neutral” policies like red lining, separate but unequal schooling, and far more followed the Great Migration. Brown v. Board was slowly eroded by an increasingly conservative Supreme Court and white flight. Mass incarceration served as the new Jim Crow after the civil rights successes of the 1960s. Finally, the first white president has followed the first African American one. White Rage is short, but very well documented with the Notes rivaling the length of the main text. Each short chapter, however, should invoke a different kind of rage, or at least an introspection, among white readers. Especially in this political moment as we seek to find our way in the current backlash, but also in the midst of the next civil rights movement that has been forming around Black Lives Matter and efforts to reform the criminal justice system and restore voting rights to citizens with a criminal record. It is not enough to simply be “nice white people” anymore. Plenty of “nice white people” were part of these eruptions of white rage. We need to do the work to become allies. I am still learning how to do that. It is not easy, but I believe it is worth it.

Following on the heals of Our Towns, I dove into a very different book that is also attached to my research interests. This time mental health and addiction. I sadly missed the opportunity to hear Congressman Patrick Kennedy speak about his life and his book A Common Struggle when I was at Stockton University. I regret not seeing him speak then, but am happy that I could still read his memoir.

As the jacket suggests, this book “weaves together Kennedy’s private and professional narratives…” Its central tenant is that mental illness and addiction are diseases, not moral failings. Kennedy makes this argument through not only his personal story of bipolar disorder and substance abuse, but also the story of his broader family. He particularly highlights his mother’s alcoholism and father’s abuse of alcohol that he was unable to admit. He also weaves in his aunts Eunice Kennedy Shriver (founder of the Special Olympics) and Rosemary Kennedy (who was lobotomized and institutionalized due to mental illness).

This was a powerful read for me. It was only recently that I have been directly impacted by chronic mental health challenges. My mom suffered from lifelong depression and took her own life in 2017. The trauma of that loss made what were previously episodic issues with anxiety grew into chronic anxiety. I also have fortunately not been impacted by addiction. I say all of this because Kennedy’s honest description of both his journey to a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and struggles with addiction provided a first-hand account of things that I study at a population/community/policy level, but have largely not experienced personally. It is easy for those of us studying policy to be detached from the everyday experiences of those affected by societal and individual problems. Reading Kennedy’s story was helpful in humanizing the issues of mental health and addiction.

His book is also important for making the argument that mental illness and addiction are medical issues. He chronicles the medical and counseling services that he tried throughout his struggles. At the same time, he weaves in his efforts at passing the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act in 2008. What struck me the deepest when reading his story was that the goal of mental health policy work should not only be to overcome remaining stigma and develop appropriate multifaceted treatments, but also to make it so that you do not have to be a Kennedy to access all of the care that he describes throughout the book. The struggle maybe be common, as Kennedy argues, but access to treatment is clearly not. He had great privilege that allowed him to access care at places like the Mayo Clinic. It is striking that if even he had difficulty in getting his bipolar disorder and addiction under control, it is all the more difficult for those that do not have the resources to continually seek different types of care. All should have this right, it should not be a privilege of wealth.