Nonfiction November Week 4: Diverse perspectives

 We've passed the halfway mark in this challenge month.  Week 4 asks us which book we read this past year from a diverse author, or one that changed our perspectives.  The host this week is Rebekah at She Seeks Nonfiction. 

 I've done both. 

Diverse authors:  I picked George Takei, Japanese-American (nisei), reading his graphic novel They Called Us Enemy, about his family's experience being interned by the government during World War II.  I think he picked the graphic novel format to appeal to readers younger than I am, though the format has an immediacy that mere words cannot achieve, even for an old fogey like me.  We see the degradation these thousands upon thousands of loyal American citizens suffered, the indignity of being considered "enemy aliens."  Ever since I first learned about the internment, when I was in high school, it has been something I consider to have been offensive.  Do I not get the concept of "national security?"  Yes, I do, having served in the military and having taken a seminar in national defense taught by a retired Navy admiral with wide experience in the concept.  The mass labeling of people who don't deserve the label is offensive to me.  If there are a few security risks, concentrate on them.  Don't throw innocent and loyal folk into concentration camps.  War hysteria is a thing.  It is not a good thing.

For a book that changed my perspective, it is Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, by Sheri Fink.  Fink, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter, demonstrates the horrible lack of preparedness for Hurricane Katrina.  The subject hospital, in New Orleans during and after that storm, was cut off by flood waters.  Services -- electricity, supply, rescue -- were unavailable for a period during and after the storm.  Medications and other supplies were running out.  Patients who needed machines -- respirators, monitors, IV pumps -- had to depend on the failing generator capacity of the hospital.  Finally, the staff were presented with the extreme of triage, having literally to decide which patients could be saved and which could not.  Having been a registered nurse, I had to conclude that I don't know how I'd have reacted in such a situation.  But I think the staff made the only choice they could make, under those incredibly horrid circumstances.  Where lies the blame, if any is to be assessed?  I think it belongs to those who made paper promises of rescue and restoration, and failed miserably to keep them.