Book Summary
As an award-winning roving national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, Barry Siegel has had the enviable assignment of seeking out virtually any story that provokes his curiosity. This superb collection is drawn from ten years of his freewheeling mandate. Wonderfully varied in setting, scope, characters, and subject matter, each piece is both an individual triumph and a penetrating view of the true colors of the world we live in--a world cast in shades of gray.
Ambiguity. It is the subterranean reality of our lives. We yearn to have problems resolved with a yes or a no; to have people be provably good or bad; to have issues clearly definable as right or wrong. But as Siegel's investigations reveal, the truths beneath the surface of events belie such absolutes. The judge who single-handedly brought financial absolution to the hordes of women allegedly injured by the Dalkon Shield IUD did so by becoming their impassioned advocate.
And toppling a giant corporation--but would this have been the outcome if he had not dangerously stretched judicial limits? Did his end justify his means? The physicians who have pioneered astounding feats of surgery on babies still in the womb achieve triumphs beyond belief, saving infants who would have surely died--but they walk fine ethical lines with imperfect skills. Decisions are often anguishing, outcomes sometimes tragic. A man set adrift in the uncertain new.
World of "risk managers," faced with balancing human lives against economic cost, grapples with imponderables. How much dirt to dump on a landfill full of uranium tailings, if it will cost an additional quarter of a billion dollars to bury it deep enough to reduce the extra deaths from cancer from one every three years to one every thirty years? You can buy a lot of kidney machines and cardiac-care ambulances for a quarter of a billion dollars. Story after dramatic human.
Story forces us to confront the dilemmas of our daily lives. Matters of justice, of medicine, of family, of science, of nature--these are the areas that draw Siegel's passionate interest because in them he finds individuals wrestling with something important. In deciding to break up a family, to abort a deformed fetus, to punish a passionate judge, to reward an ambitious scientist, to rescue or condemn a Death Row inmate, people are making moral choices. And combined.
These choices send signals about our values, signals that guide and empower the institutions that most affect our lives. Above all, this book is a collection of marvelous stories, but their resonance extends to our deepest nature.
