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ida_ree 's review for:
Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service
by Michael Lewis
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
I wish this book could have been published and read by every voter before the last presidential election. It's a fascinating read, containing chapters by various authors, each of them doing a deep dive on one person or group within the federal government, showing what work they do and how it helps us all.
The first chapter is about a former coal miner turned engineer who made it his life's mission to prevent roof collapses in mines, the number one cause of on-the-job death for miners. He has had pretty good success. The slate of writers here is impressive - Dave Eggers writing about the Jet Propulsion Lab, W. Kamau Bell explaining what antitrust laws are, Sarah Vowell (be still my heart) taking on the National Archives (be still my heart again.) I learned there's a woman who has been working at the FDA trying her best to build some kind of system for medical professionals to use as a repository of information about the treatment of rare diseases. That was the most pulse-pounding chapter for me as it involved the story of a critically ill child.
Time and again, the featured workers share the credit with their team or department. It breaks my heart to think of how much of this work is probably grinding to a halt right now as the government purge goes on.
The first chapter is about a former coal miner turned engineer who made it his life's mission to prevent roof collapses in mines, the number one cause of on-the-job death for miners. He has had pretty good success. The slate of writers here is impressive - Dave Eggers writing about the Jet Propulsion Lab, W. Kamau Bell explaining what antitrust laws are, Sarah Vowell (be still my heart) taking on the National Archives (be still my heart again.) I learned there's a woman who has been working at the FDA trying her best to build some kind of system for medical professionals to use as a repository of information about the treatment of rare diseases. That was the most pulse-pounding chapter for me as it involved the story of a critically ill child.
Time and again, the featured workers share the credit with their team or department. It breaks my heart to think of how much of this work is probably grinding to a halt right now as the government purge goes on.