In 2015, during the very week a pediatrician-turned-researcher exposed the high likelihood that lead-laced water was poisoning the child population of Flint, Mich, two officials of the Environmental Protection Agency engaged in an email exchange that, in retrospect, serves as an encapsulation of that city’s water crisis. Wrote one to the other: 'I’m not so sure Flint is the community we want to go out on a limb for.' Came the too-succinct reply: 'I concur.' ... The mindset among the many layers of bureaucrats who failed to protect Flint is the dragon in Mona Hanna-Attisha’s account of the crisis, What the Eyes Don’t See. And she, in the story she tells, is the dragon-slayer, that same pediatrician-turned-researcher whose weapons against a failed system were persistence, data and her own outrage ... As such, this book is not a journalistic account of Flint’s water crisis, but the memoir of an activist.
In the heart of the world's wealthiest nation, 100,000 people were poisoned by the water supply for two years --- with the knowing complicity of their government. Written by the crusading pediatrician who helped turn the crisis into a transformative movement for change, What your Eyes Don't See is a devastating insider chronicle of the Flint water crisis, the signature environmental disaster of our time, and a riveting narrative of personal advocacy.
Mona Hanna-Attisha’s account of that urban man-made disaster reads both as a detective story and as an exposé ... Her book reinforced my belief that the first step to becoming a citizen activist is seeing the world as it should be, not as it is given to you.
...[a] gripping memoir ... She is disarmingly modest ... Hanna-Attisha is a chatty and entertaining narrator. And while I’m not sure I needed to hear about her mother’s crepes with 'gooey Nutella on top,' or to eavesdrop on her pillow talk with her husband about the emotional drama of the day, these are minor sins ... Her book has power precisely because she takes the events she recounts so personally ... A great virtue of her book is the moral outrage present on every page.
...[an] intimate and subjective memoir ... Hanna-Attisha’s quest is full of drama and suspense: late-night number-crunching, slimy government figures, inspired breakthroughs. She’s a breezy, charismatic raconteur prone to feisty character descriptions ... while she paints herself as relentlessly righteous, she also opens up about the toll of this crusade ... While What the Eyes Don’t See can veer into sentimentality and self-congratulation, Hanna-Attisha, too, is wary of the 'single story.' She threads the book with tales of her immigrant family’s journey.
...a thoughtful, at times blistering meditation on how Hanna-Attisha’s own eyes were opened by the failures of public agencies created to protect public health, and by people who appeared to be more interested in saving their jobs than coming to grips with what had happened in Flint ... While weaving her own family’s story through the book—her parents are Iraqi Christians who fled during Saddam Hussein’s regime—Hanna-Attisha sheds new light on how she overcame bureaucratic and political resistance for a game-changing study that revealed the percentage of Flint children with high blood-lead levels had almost doubled after the water switch.
An Iraqi immigrant and pediatrician recounts the epidemiological sleuthing that uncovered the lead crisis in the drinking water of Flint, Michigan ... A budgetary shortcut was to change Flint’s source of drinking water from Lake Huron to the Flint River, long used for dumping industrial waste. Bacteria was one thing, but high concentrations of lead quite another...drinking Flint River water was 'like drinking through a lead painted straw,' with resulting developmental delays and cognitive damage that will plague Flint for generations. Hanna-Attisha writes, this is 'the story of a government poisoning its own citizens, and then lying about it'—and it demands greater justice than has been served ... An important contribution to the literature of environmental activism—and environmental racism.
This powerful firsthand account from Hanna-Attisha recalls her efforts to alert government officials to the public health disaster caused by lead in the water supply of Flint, Mich ... Hanna-Attisha, who directs the pediatric residency program at Hurley Medical Center, where many of Flint’s poor children are treated, received a tip about lead levels and realized her patients were particularly vulnerable to lead poisoning ... She recounts how state and local government officials ignored her requests for data, deflected responsibility, downplayed the threat, and tried to discredit the findings of her study ... Attisha’s empathy for her patients and the people of Flint comes through, as do her pride in her Iraqi roots and her persistent optimism. It’s an inspiring work, valuable for anybody who wants to understand Flint’s recent history.
