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are, in fact, patients' best allies in any new quest to overhaul our high- priced system." We'd argue that nurses are, in fact, patients' best allies. So while her book is a great foundational read on how every sec- tor of the healthcare industry works, don't depend on Rosenthal to draw the right political conclusions or advocate for the type of sys- tem where healthcare is treated as a human right. —Lucia Hwang Catching Homelessness: A Nurse's Story of Falling Through the Safety Net By Josephine Ensign SheWrites Press, 2016 Like most readers, I've read books I've enjoyed so much I never wanted them to end. Rarely do I read a book howev- er, that from the moment I finish it, I want to read it again. Josephine Ensign's Catching Homelessness: A Nurse's Story of Falling Through the Safety Net, is one of those books. I confess that prior to reading this book, I had grown frustrated with the many profiles of homeless people in the media. While most of these treatments are trying to humanize the subject and instill empathy in the audience, the net effect has been to objectify the poor and solidify the notion that home- lessness and poverty are chronic, incurable conditions. This book is not a book of solutions, but it does contain important clues for those of us who desire an end to poverty and homelessness and welcome a path to connect or reconnect with these issues. Ensign uses her life story, including her nursing practice to the homeless and her own eventual homelessness, as a plot line around which to describe the rise of homelessness during the 1980s in the United States and especially in her hometown, Richmond, Va. She describes where she was raised, by devout white Christian parents, as a former Confederate battlefield, riddled with bullets and arrowheads, and mixed with the bones of the Powhatan tribe, African slaves, and Confederate soldiers. Long before the recent waves of homeless, she reflects, the land was "heavy with the remains of the displaced." Ensign moves away from the South for college but returns to Richmond to attend nursing school. After graduation, she imagines she will follow in the footsteps of many of her relatives, pursuing missionary work in another country. As a nursing student, however, she soon discovers through volunteer work in a storefront clinic for the homeless that there is "missions-type" work to be done in her own hometown. She admires the clinic doctor's "quiet personal faith" and is attracted to the clinic's mission, providing "basic health- care for free to poor people." By contrast, she finds nursing training "stultifying" and "dehu- manizing," with instructors that seem "intent on extinguishing any compassion or empathy we came in to school with." Ensign's descriptions are vivid here, as they are throughout the book. The students are forced to wear heavy navy-blue cotton uniforms and use "decaying black leather nursing bags" that "crackled when opened, emitting a moldering smell." What's more, the instructors insist that the student nurses use "proper bag technique," and demonstrate exactly "how to open and extract contents." Unwilling to use the bag, Ensign's instructors threaten to fail her for insubordination. After graduation, she pursues her dream of working in commu- nity health, by landing a job with the clinic she volunteered for as a student nurse. Soon the clinic relocates to a massive homeless shel- ter. Although the clinic is still a project of the Christian clinic, and under the remote supervision of a Christian doctor, for whom this is a ministry, she is basically on her own. During this period, she assents to what she calls "a sort-of-arranged marriage" to a seminary student picked out by her parents. She has a baby in short order, but goes back to work, as she is the sole breadwinner for her family, while her husband continues to study. At first, she sees her work with the homeless as virtuous and fulfill- ing, recognizing herself as one of the "1000 points of light" President H.W. Bush was promoting as part of the Republican effort to cut social services and privatize the rest. His plan includes ignoring the separation between church and state and allowing federal grants to faith-based social services. Meanwhile, Ensign's family questions the Christian value of her work. Quoting the bible, her husband accuses her of "throwing pearls before swine." She decides to separate from him. Like the Southern vine Kudzu, a recurring visual in the book, more oppressive forces begin to close in on Ensign. The Board of Medicine, run by all white men, representing the social and political status quo of Virginia, instigates an investigation to determine whether or not she is exceeding her scope of practice as a nurse. Her employer, the clinic board, then reprimands her for lacking piety and failing to proselytize patients. They complain that she is too supportive of women who want abortions, too willing to treat people with HIV. They demand that she take a month off, to pray and reflect and consider returning to her hus- band. While she is gone, they will retool the clinic to focus on serving the "working poor" rather than the homeless, who they deem without virtue. usually cannot even get accurate information from fracking com- panies about what their patients have been exposed to because the companies claim the chemicals are secret, proprietary infor- mation. The Frackopoly is important to understand not just for the actual human, environmental, and overall climate damage that their enterprises cause, but because their unchecked dominance and control over the energy debate, public perception, and the political process unnecessarily creates demand for fossil fuel products, removes incentives to reduce energy usage, and blocks the sustainable energy transition from "blossoming," as Hauter explains. The book also details some of the victorious and important fights communities have waged against the Frackopoly, most notably the state ban against fracking won by activists in New York state in 2014 and the growing movement by local munici- palities, such as Santa Cruz, Mendocino, and Monterey counties in California, to ban fracking within their boundaries. The anti- fracking movement is gaining traction. She urges us all to organ- ize, organize, organize to pressure our elected officials to ban fracking and keep all fossil fuels in the ground, as well as to truly support the development and transition to renewable energy. This is not light reading, but Hauter does a good job of writing clearly and weaving in stories where appropriate. Frackopoly is an eye-opening book, and represents yet another important con- tribution Hauter has made to our shared goal of global public health. —Lucia Hwang J U LY | A U G U S T | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 6 W W W . N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G N A T I O N A L N U R S E 15