Gray Mountain

Book Review: GRAY MOUNTAIN by John Grisham; Action novel, 2014; Dell Publishing

The year is 2008, two weeks after Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Samantha Kofer, 29-year-old third-year associate in a large Manhattan law firm finds herself suddenly on unpaid leave, being escorted out the company door with a list of ten volunteer organizations that might be accepting interns. Hundreds of young lawyers are in similar straits, and most openings are already filled. The last on her list, Mountain Legal Aid Clinic, in Brady, Virginia, population 2,200, has other applicants, but is willing to interview her.

She is stopped on the outskirts of Brady “for speeding”. Suspicious of her New York ID and her rental car's Vermont plates, the cop arrests her, allowing no argument. As she sits alone in the county jail waiting area, a young man enters. “Miss Kofer? My name is Donovan Gray and I'm your attorney. I've just gotten all your charges dismissed.” He hands her a business card which looks legitimate. He turns out to be the nephew of Mattie Wyatt, the director of Mountain Legal Aid, and explains that his aunt is in court, but wants to see Samantha at five.

He drives her back to her car, then guides her to the Aid Clinic.

“So, do I owe you a fee?”

“Sure. A cup of coffee at the cafe down the street. You have time to kill before Mattie is free.” This is her introduction to small town law practice in the Appalachian coal country. Much different from the big firm in New York.

Mattie's clients are mostly unemployed coal miners, or chronically ill, or victims of con men, unable to afford a lawyer. Nephew Donovan has his own separate practice, mostly suing coal companies for victimizing their employees, or for environmental pollution. Mattie's orientation advice is practical: “Just take notes, frown a lot, and try and look intelligent.”

The first client's husband had been arrested in the next county, fined for a minor infraction, had no money and was jailed. His debt was turned over to a collection agency, who added multiple “service charges” that he also couldn't pay. Debtors' prison has been outlawed in USA for 200 years, but the collection agency counted on their victim's inability to afford a lawyer. Mattie had dealt with them before, and rattled off a dozen ways she would deal with them.

Another client's husband beats her severely when he gets drunk, and is now enraged that she called the police. She is terrified of him, wants a divorce, and protection.

An old lady wants her will changed. Her only asset is eighty acres of land that a coal mine wants. She fears that her five children will sell the property as soon as she dies, and the coal mine will strip the land to get the coal beneath it. She wants to cut her children out of her will and donate the land to a non-profit organization.

A divorced woman and her two kids are homeless after a collection agency garnisheed her wages, her employer fired her, and her landlord evicted her. She and the kids have been living in her small car for two weeks; she is down to her last two dollars and needs gas for the car and food for the kids.

But the big case of the year is one of Samantha's new clients. Buddy Ryzer has had 'black lung disease' – a common disability in coal miners – for ten years, but Lonerock Mining Co.. refuses to pay compensation. Their lawyers routinely appeal the government's order, and have goons to punish anyone who objects. “We gotta have a lawyer, but nobody will take our case.” Buddy had no choice but to go on working, but he can barely breathe. He and his wife brought two shopping bags of papers – who's gonna look through all those, right? Samantha does, and finds incriminating evidence that the company has known all along that Buddy is disabled and they chose to ignore it.

By the the time the dust settles, Donovan has died under suspicious circumstances; his younger brother, Jeff Gray – not a lawyer, but a bulldog who won't let go – vows to avenge him. The FBI has seized the Clinic's computers, Samantha's life is endangered, and she has to decide her next move.

Author John Gresham is justly famous for his legal action novels. I have read several and enjoy his style, except that he often ends them with the hero or heroine safe from danger and with $10,000,000 stashed away somewhere. Not this time. But the reader will identify with the parade of down-in-their-luck clients and the way he handles them and their toxic surroundings in this story. Well worth reading.

When Breath Becomes Air: book review

Book Review: WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR by Paul Kalanithi 2016 Penguin/Random Publishing

As a boy growing up in the desert town of Kingman, Arizona, Paul Kalanithi was certain he would never become a doctor like his father or so many others in his family. His father was never home until late at night. Friendly, offering brief encouragement or advice, but hardly ever available. If asked what he wanted to study in college, Paul was vague---maybe writing; maybe something about life's meaning . . . something about the mind . . .

During his senior year in college, his class visited a home for people who had had severe brain injuries. The place was a storehouse, really; a place for those whose families had long ago given up visiting them, a place to exist, but not to live. “Only later would I realize that brains give rise to our ability to form relationships and make life meaningful. Sometimes, they break.”

Some of his classmates graduating from Stanford headed for New York to pursue life in the arts, but that didn't quite seem to fit him. He couldn't let go of the question: Where did biology, morality, literature, and philosophy all come together? The answer came to hm, “Set aside the books and practice medicine.” It would take him a couple of years to make up for the lack of chemistry and physics in his previous studies, but he gained admission to a whole new world at Yale Medical school.

Many books have been written about the medical school experience and the exotic diseases the student may encounter. Kalanithi's visit to 'the home for broken brains' apparently stuck firmly in his mind. He thought he might become a psychiatrist, studying diseases of the mind.

But he saw that the brain was the physical engine that operated the mind, and he resolved to become a neurosurgeon. Speculation on theories of psychiatry gave way to what he called the 'moral mission of medicine' which is fixing what is wrong. “The patient is more important than the paperwork.”

The training period for a brain surgeon is among the most demanding and lengthy that a medical school graduate can undergo---six to eight more years beyond the four years of college plus the four years of medical school. Increasing responsibility of the senior surgical resident requires twelve- to fourteen-hour days on duty, regardless of fatigue. Speed and technique are not the only things that matter. Talking with the patient and family at the right pace; always leaving room for hope, takes time and empathy. It almost destroyed his marriage. He and Lucy met in first-year med school---she entered internal medicine--- and they were very much in love, but she was beginning to feel the strain of his continual duties in the hospital, and suggested marriage counseling.

During the last year of training – chief neurosurgical resident – he experienced chest pain and weight loss. He and Lucy have a rare afternoon taking in the sun at a San Francisco park. Lucy glimpses his phone screen displaying some search results: “frequency of cancers in thirty- to forty-year-olds.” He didn't want to discuss it. She didn't accompany him on a trip a few days later; said she had some things she needed to sort out. He began suffering intolerable, screaming-in-pain back spasms; cut his trip short. Back at home he told her he had cancer. She knew. The distance between them vanished. “I will never leave you,” she promised.

Paul was admitted to the hospital as a patient. His new doctor, Emma Hayward, came into the room to introduce herself to him and his family (most of them doctors too.) He supposed she could tell him about survival statistics.

“No,” she said, “Absolutely not. We can talk about treatment later. And about going back to work, too, if that's what you'd like to do. I'll see you Thursday after the tests I've ordered are back.” His family contacted many of their fellow doctors to find out the best treatment for him. To their surprise they found that most recommended Dr. Hayward as not only world-renowned, but compassionate, knowing when to push and when to hold back.

And with that, the future Paul and Lucy had anticipated for so long evaporated. But his curiosity and intellect remained fully active. Some conditions are universal; one he had always seen and accepted was that death comes to each one of us. What is it that makes my life worth living? he asked. Dr. Hayward laid it out for him: What do you want to accomplish?

There were several things. He had already begun healing his marriage by opening his thoughts to Lucy. They discussed whether to have a child. Whether to return to the practice of surgery, or to take a professorship. Above all, he wanted to write this book, to encourage people to not give up living just because of a diagnosis. “A diagnosis is not the end,” to quote Dr. Hayward, “or even the beginning of the end. It is just the end of the beginning.”

Endangered: book review

Book Review: ENDANGERED, by C. J. Box (regional author) fiction Penguin Publishing, 2015

Wyoming State Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett finds twenty-one dead sage grouse among shotgun shells at the side of a back-country road. Not only is Joe offended by the wanton killing, but the federal government has been talking about putting sage grouse on the endangered list. Placing their wide-spread prairie habitat off-limits to ranchers, coal miners, timber companies, and clean energy developers would affect Wyoming's whole economy.

While Joe collects the necessary scene photos and a sampling of empty shotgun shells, he gets a call from the county sheriff. A deputy has found a trauma victim in a ditch, barely alive, no ID. “But from the description, Joe, it could be your daughter April.” April Pickett had turned eighteen the previous year, and had run off with a local rodeo cowboy, Dallas Cates. They have rarely heard from her since.

Joe hurries back to town to meet his wife Marybeth at the local hospital. The victim is indeed April, unconscious and unresponsive from blunt head injuries. The Life Flight helicopter arrives from the trauma center in Billings, Montana; Marybeth is allowed to ride with her daughter, with Joe to follow. Joe is certain that Dallas did it.

The Cates family is a scraggly lot, living on twelve acres about twenty miles from town.The father, Eldon, runs a hunters guide business, and services septic tanks outside hunting season. Bull, the oldest son, is not very bright, but powerfully muscled. Joe had once caught Bull and his wife Cora Lee with a six by six elk three days before hunting season opened, and has won their permanent anger. The second son, Timber, is doing a three-year sentence at Rawlins state prison, for carjacking a tourist when his own car ran out of gas. Dallas is the youngest, and his mother's favorite, because he's going to make the family famous with his rodeo stardom. The mother, Brenda, is the brains of the outfit. She now makes a pre-emptive visit to the sheriff''s office to express her sympathy for the Pickett family. She would have brought Dallas too, she says, but he is recovering from serious injuries from his latest bull ride at the rodeo in Houston. She says April left her son severalweeks ago for another rodeo star and they haven't seen her since.

Sheriff Mike Reed and county prosecutor Dulcie Schalk share Joe's doubts about Brenda's story, but have no hard evidence to go on. Things get complicated when April's purse is found on loner Tilden Cardmore's property, not far from where April had been found. Tilden is totally anti-government and uncooperative, defending his home with multiple firearms.

Further, Annie Hatch and Revis Wentworth, of the federal Sage Grouse Task Force arrive to investigate the “sage grouse massacre”, demanding details and documentation when Joe needs to keep ahead of the Cates family. The outlook for April is still in doubt; the neurosurgeon is keeping her in induced coma until the swelling in her brain decreases. And Nate, an old friend of Joe's appears on the scene in time to get shot by Eldon Cates and get admitted to the same intensive care unit, just down the hall from April. His girl friend, Liv Brannon, gets kidnapped by Brenda to keep her from contacting the police.

Brenda appears to be getting more mentally deranged with each passing day. She keeps the girl she has kidnapped in a pit under her husband's machine shop out back. Brenda has never had a daughter, and wants a woman to talk to and comb her hair. At the same time, Liv is made aware that Brenda intends her never to leave this pit alive.

Author C. J. Box handles his characterizations and many-faceted plot very well. This action subgenre can get out of hand if too many characters find themselves improbably situated in just the right place at just the right time---the reader may feel that his stamina and belief are being tested, thus breaking the story's spell. But this story kept me reading to the end. Box lives in Wyoming; this is his fifth Joe Pickett novel.

God's Secretaries, By Adam Nicolson; Book Review

Book Review: GOD'S SECRETARIES by Adam Nicolson: HarperCollins 2003

The Making of the King James Bible

The year is 1603: Elizabeth I, Queen of England has finally died in her querulous old age. She had no children; her 37-year-old nephew James Stuart, King of Scotland, is next of kin. England as a whole is looking forward to a prosperous future, and is receptive to the joining of the two kingdoms.

After decades of war, and religious differences between Church of England, Catholics, and Scottish Presbyterians, James saw his own royal duty to be a peacemaker. Since the invention of the printing press a hundred years earlier, many translations of the Christian Bible existed, each opposed---often violently—by the beliefs of other Christians. King James decided to convene scholars representing all major viewpoints to make a version approved by the Crown.

King James and Richard Bancroft (Archbishop of Canterbury, Church of England) drew up rules for translators, At least fifty men took part in the new translation, divided into six groups, three assigned to the Old Testament, one to the books of the Apocrypha, two to the New Testament. Most were church leaders, chiefly Church of England, some from the opposing Puritans, some Scottish Presbyterians, a few were university officials of Oxford, Cambridge, or Westminster. England's Secretary of State, Robert Cecil, was a main organizer of the effort and assistant to the King. Work began in 1604; and they published it in 1611.

London was not entirely a holy city during this period. A terrorist plot to blow up parliament almost succeeded. The wife of one translator eloped with another man and her husband forcibly took her back, to wide publicity. Shakespeare was writing his plays. 120 colonists leave to establish the first town in Virginia; Henry Hudson seeks a North-West Passage to China; a group of Puritans will soon set sail on the Mayflower, seeking religious freedom in America..

The King James Bible, with its memorable verses, together with growing literacy in the English-speaking nations would be a “Christmas gift” lasting the next four hundred years and counting. The English language is continually changing as time goes on, but new ways of responding to the Bible stories constantly appear.

Excerpt from the King James Version (KJV):

“And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

“And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

“And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace good will toward men.” (from Luke, chapter 2. King James Bible)

Examples of new ways of understanding the meaning in more modern English:

“O little town of Bethlehem, How still we see thee lie!

Above thy deep and dreamless sleep, The silent stars go by;

Yet in thy dark streets shineth The everlasting light;

The hopes and fears of all the years Are met in thee tonight” (Phillips Brooks)

“I wonder as I wander out under the sky,

How Jesus the Savior did come for to die.

For poor ornery people like you and like I -

I wonder as I wander, out under the sky.” (Appalachian Carol, John Jacob Niles)

I questioned her plan to move from northern Montana to Colorado in the middle of winter, and in the eighth month of her first pregnancy.

“Joe found work down there, and we need to stay together.” She seemed satisfied with her answer.

“What will happen if you go into labor in the middle of a Wyoming blizzard?” I asked gently. “Cars do break down sometimes, you know. If you must go, at least take the bus.”

“Can't afford it until we get a paycheck.” She smiled at the rusty clunker parked outside. “Joe just finished rebuilding the engine. And we'll carry a blanket. God'll get us there!”

The odds were strong against Jesus being born safely that night long ago. Mary must have had misgivings about the whole thing. Would a midwife be available? Or would the only person around be her husband? He was a good carpenter, but he didn't have much experience in assisting childbirth.

But when there are no alternatives to taking risks, the knowledge that God is with us can sustain us in our endeavor. And God-directed endeavors can change the world. (From “The Workplaces of Christmas”)

Baby Jesu . . . I'm a poor boy, too . . .

I have no gift for you . . . Shall I play for you . . .On my drum. . .

And he smiled at me . . . Me and my drum . . .

(from Carol of the Drum, translated by Katherine Davis)

Each gives from what we have.

Merry Christmas

The Polish Officer , by Alan Furst; book review

September, 1939: Four days after Hitler's German army, the Wehrmacht, sweeps across Poland's borders, Polish forces are still defending Warsaw but the outcome is only a matter of time. Captain Alexander de Milja is carrying out his orders to destroy government documents, when he is summoned by a Colonel Vyborg.

“We want to offer you a job, but I emphasize that you have a choice. The nation is defeated, but the idea of the nation mustn't be. If you want to die on the battlefield, I won't stop you. Or, come work for us.” Vyborg is in Military Intelligence, and must get Poland's gold bullion reserves out of the city before the Germans' blockade is complete. Captain De Milja's assignment: take command of the six-car Pilava local train to it's usual destination, thirty miles away, and keep going, around the east end of German-occupied Czechoslovakia, and onward to the Romanian border, where the gold (hidden under the floorboards) will be forwarded to Poland's government-in-exile in Paris.

This is no easy task. Crowds of refugees struggle to get aboard; German warplanes are scouting for anything that moves, bandits roam the countryside, and Romania is 300 miles away. De Milja succeeds, however, and returns to Warsaw under fake ID.

He finds a printer and a pilot willing to take risks; They shower Warsaw with thousands of leaflets signed by Britain's air force. “We'll be back soon, and next time we won't be dropping leaflets. Give the Germans hell any way you can. Long Live Poland! Tenth Bomber Wing, RAF.” The small plane is back in its hangar before the Gemans can detect it.

The Germans' plan for Poland's future is quite simple: deliberate devaluation of the currency, replace the judges, direction of labor, registration of everybody. The Germans would know who and where everyone is. And would control where you work and how hard, and at what pay. “The essential mechanics of slavery.”

What the Germans find they cannot control is the safety of the trains crossing Poland to their then-ally Soviet Russia, their main source of crude oil. That's where De Milja and his colleagues operate. Incendiary devices attached to Russian oil tank cars, exploding at random. Bombs in iron ore shipments, set off by the heat when dumped into a German blast furnace.

The war in western Europe heats up, with the German end-run around France's massive Maginot Line, defeating the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk. The Polish Government-in-exile, now in London, transfers de Milja to Paris, where he had studied in student days. Different ID, different work, even a different assigned mistress. His job: cultivate contacts, gather information on German activity, especially on “Operation Sealion”, the planned invasion of the British Isles. Starting from where? Location of canals, number of barges, destination of trains, empty cargo ships at anchor. Take only 15 minutes to transmit in code, or German radio direction finders can locate and eliminate the operator.

Logic would launch the attack from Calais where the English Channel is narrow. De Milja focuses on that area after getting word that Germany will stage an invasion rehearsal. By mid-September, all trains to Calais and Boulogne are suspended. Military traffic only. De Milja and his superior, General Fedin explore the Calais waterfront, question bartenders, observe barges and tugboats.

The British offer a “rehearsal” of their own, based on information transmitted by de Milja's radio operator just before the Gestapo detects her location and arrests her. The first attack comes at 10:15 pm, Beaufort bombers. The Germans are waiting for them and respond with antiaircraft fire. The second attack comes at 11:16 and meets another firestorm. “One last thing to try,” says De Milja,and leaves his observation point to go down among the dock wreckage, its flames partially canceling the harbor's black-out. He locates a freighter, the Malacca Princess, whose name and cargo he recognizes from clandestine harbor records. He boards and accosts the lone watchman, a young Indonesian. The boy is cooperative; he has a family somehere, and this isn't his war.

They hear distant bombs hitting harbors up the coast, Nieuwpoort, Ostend. When they hear the third wave of planes approaching, they put all the ship's light switches to the 'on' position, and run for their lives. One plane's torpedo finds the Malacca Princess,and by the light of it's burning cargo, 100,000 gallons of naphtha, the planes have no trouble seeing every ship in the harbor. Operation Sealion never happens—Hitler's first defeat. As author Furst expresses it, Germans are brave, and not afraid to die. But they are afraid to fail.

Having extended his empire from France to Poland, and from Norway to North Africa, Hitler now attacks Soviet Russia, meeting initial success until the Russian winter sets in, and America begins its active role in the World-wide war.

Alexander de Milja is redeployed, back to his native Poland and the new eastern front.

Polish officers do not give up.

In some ways, this is a difficult book to read. Polish spelling can be hard to pronounce for those accustomed to English. And at close range, the realities of war and the lives that people must choose in order to survive, conflict with our own perceptions of patriotism and national glory. But In addition to being a best selling “spy thriller”, Mr. Furst's novel offers some deeper thoughts for the reader to ponder. Having a good world atlas on hand also helps follow the action.

The Forgotten War, by Stan Cohen

     Mr. Cohen is a local author (Missoula, MT), and proprietor of Pictorial Histories Publishing Company, who writes and illustrates books chiefly about Alaska and Canada. This book is a succinct and documented story about the World War II campaign in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. It is the only time in the past 200 years in which American soil has been invaded by hostile soldiers on the ground.

     The author writes several pages of text in each of his seventeen topical chapters, but each chapter also has perhaps twice that many full pages of vivid photographs and maps, with brief explantory comments.

     Bought from Russia in 1867, the average American thought it a waste of the seven million dollar price. It had fish, and fur, and for a brief period a gold rush, but that was about all. Only in the 1930's did Canada and the USA begin to see war coming, and realize that Russia, Japan, and even Europe were much closer by the Polar route than by the wide oceans that separated us at warmer latitudes.

     The attack on Pearl Harbor not only destroyed much of USA's Pacific Fleet, but was a wake-up call on the vulnerability of all Alaska and the west coast to invasion. A highway far enough inland to be safe from hostile aircraft was needed to move troops and supplies to Alaska through intensely cold and mostly uninhabited land. Access to fuel required yet more roads. Military and naval bases were needed; there was only one in all of Alaska. The Alcan Highway—1,200 miles, 133 bridges and 8,000 culverts---opened (though still primitive) in eight and a half months in 1942.

     Meanwhile, Japanese forces had occupied the Philippines, were reaching for Australia, and advancing across the Pacific Islands. The turning point in the overall war came in June of 1942, when Japan's radio code was deciphered by the Allies. American Naval Intelligence learned that four Japanese aircraft carriers would attack Midway Island on June 4th. American carriers were waiting for them and sank all four, leaving airborne Japanese pilots no place to land. Japan sent two other carriers toward Alaska to attack the new U.S. base there at Dutch Harbor, leaving the Japanese with little naval power in the South Pacific.

    J apan did however succeed in occupying the islands of Attu and Kiska with around 9,000 men for a year. The purpose was to build a base to protect Japan's northern flank, and provide a possible route to invade Canada and United States. However, the battle of Midway had changed the balance of power, and the new American P-38 fighter-bomber proved superior to the Japanese “Zero”. Japan could still supply their Alaskan base by submarines, but subs couldn't carry the heavy equipment needed to complete their airfield on Kiska Island. Unable to defend against increasing American air power, Japanese destroyers raced in under cover of thick fog and evacuated Kiska. The battle to retake Attu lasted nineteen days, and was one of the first landing-craft invasions of the war; the Americans finally won, at great cost in lives on both sides.

The Japanese were not the only problem in the Aleutian campaign. Distance was another: Attu, the most western Aleutian Island is only 650 miles from the northernmost Japanese home bases, but 1,800 miles from mainland Alaska at Cold Harbor. Russia lost most of its air force when its former ally, Nazi Germany, attacked it. After America officially joined the Allies in December, 1941, it could build and fly “lend-lease” fighter planes and bombers via Alaska to Russian Siberia without danger from Axis forces. (Russia did not declare war on Japan until after the atomic bomb.) A route was set up from Great Falls, Montana through Edmonton Alberta, Whitehorse Yukon, and Nome Alaska, where Russian pilots would take over.

Violent weather caused more casualties than battle. Thanks to a warm Pacific current, Aleutian ports are ice free, but often fog-bound and stormy. The PT boats, so useful in the South Pacific while America was rebuilding its Pacific fleet, were tried in the Aleutians but were found useless in the rough seas. .And Alaska is cold This writer recalls reading a historical marker on the Alcan Highway commemorating a day so cold that the antifreeze froze in its containers.

By 1944 and 1945, the fighting in the north was mostly over, avoiding the massive death rates to both American and Japanese civilians and military in those years. But the war had positive effects on western Canada and Alaska: the building of infrastructure and economy might have taken decades longer, if the war had not happened. And Canada might not have been able to send most of its troops to win in Europe if required to defend its vast northern wilderness alone.

A Path Appears

Book Review: A Path Appears, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn; non-fiction Knopf

This journalism team (husband and wife) has received Pulitzer Prizes for their work twice (1990 and 2009.) The present 2014 book is about people who think and work outside the box, for the benefit of humanity. The brief and fascinating chapters cover many more individuals and groups than can be summarized in a brief review. I have selected three as representative:

:

THE PERFECT PRODUCT: CHEAP, CLEAN WATER.

Yuri Jain, at Hindustan Unilever Ltd., was aware of the problems India has in supplying clean water to its more than one billion citizens. Public water systems are poorly maintained, and most people must boil their drinking water to avoid diarrhea and other life-threatening diseases.

Even though Unilever sold no water purification products anywhere in the world, he and his team pushed the corporation to develop a product meeting high standards of performance: filter out bacteria, parasites and viruses, portable and stand-alone, needing no electricity, fuel or other outside energy source, simple enough for the uneducated to operate—put water in, get water out—and shut off automatically when the filter can not take any more dirty water.

In 2004, Unilever introduced “Pureit” producing safe drinking water at about ½ cent per liter, with the initial cost of $35. For those in poverty, the company partners with local groups, the Grameen Bank for example, to furnish microloans,. Unilever itself is not a philanthropy, but appears to be doing its best to provide a reliable product at the lowest possible cost. Their goal: “to provide clean drinking water to hundreds of millions of people by 2020.

A DOCTOR WHO TREATS VIOLENCE

Dr. Gary Slutkin had spent his career freeing San Francisco of a tuberculosis epidemic, dealing with a cholera epidemic in Somalia and AIDS in Africa, where he had to hire local translators to ensure communication with his patients. Now, after job burnout and a failed marriage, he returned to his native Chicago, looking ahead. He began studying inner-city violence and noted the similarity in its spread with the contagious diseases he had worked with: “exposure among susceptible people with low resistance or compromised immunity". Like with his patients in Africa, he needed interpreters who spoke the local “street language”, and 'violence interrupters'—someone respected among the street gangs—often ex-cons with a long rap sheet, who can stop violence in its tracks.

He cites a dramatic episode where a wife has killed her husband in self defense. She's in jail, but his gang members want vengeance and are gathering outside her apartment to shoot it up. Five kids and their grandmother are inside, and Grandma calls the neighborhood 'violence interrupter'. “China Joe? This is Linda Harris. The Vice Lords, they're bangin' on my door. Come quick or we'll all be dead!”

China Joe, and some drug dealers he was counseling when the call came, arrive to find a crowd of angry Vice Lords. He and the dealers tell them,“You know you got no business messing with someone's family! Two of those kids are Brown's own! You ain't helping him, you're hurting him!” China Joe could soon knock on Linda's door and tell her “You're safe now.” He remembered later, “They were just acting out of emotion. Once you talked to them, they knew it was the wrong thing.

Working on the principle that urban violence is not solely a moral problem nor a criminal issue, Dr. Slutkin likened it to a disease epidemic spreading among people of low resistance. His organization Cure Violence, in neighborhoods of Chicago with high crime rates and vulnerability, has met with such success that its program has been used in many parts of the USA and other countries.

ABSENCE FROM WORK OR SCHOOL

Elizabeth Scharpf's studies at Harvard Business School led her to investigate tropical Third World countries where she discovered a common problem: Sanitary pads are unaffordable, so women and schoolgirls stay home out of sight at their “time of the month”. One explained, “What if I get called to the blackboard, and I have a stain on the back of my skirt?”

After graduating, Ms. Scharpf began designing a company to manufacture “cut price sanitary pads for Africa and Asia, distributed by local women themselves, on a franchise system.” The cheapest pads in Rwanda, for example, made in China, sold for $ 1.10 for a pack of ten. Her own team of villagers, agriculture experts, and textile engineers researched locally available materials and found that banana trunk fibers really soaked up coke (their substitute for blood.) They engineered a biodegradable sanitary pad costing sixty cents for a 10-pack, still too costly for many women. The team organized 'Sustainable Health Enterprises' (SHE) a supply chain of 600 small-scale banana farmers, mostly women. Aid groups will help fund distribution at schools and refugee camps.

Problem solved? Although girls appreciate the help with menstrual hygiene, one study suggested that bicycles would help more girls attend school; another suggested that aspirin for the menstrual cramps would be more effective. Not every good idea proves successful.

Kristoff and WuDunn best sum up their philosophy of the source of new innovations by observing, “Earl Warren, as chief justice of the Supreme Court, had a huge impact on ending segregation. But so did Rosa Parks.”