Gerald E. Markowitz

Deceit and denial details the attempts by the chemical and lead industries to deceive Americans about the dangers that their deadly products present to workers, the public, and consumers. Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner pursued evidence steadily and relentlessly, interviewed the important players, investigated untapped sources, and uncovered a bruising story of cynical and cruel disregard for health and human rights. This resulting expose is full of startling revelations, provocative arguments, and disturbing conclusions--all based on remarkable research and information gleaned from secret industry documents. This book reveals for the first time the public relations campaign that the lead industry undertook to convince Americans to use its deadly product to paint walls, toys, furniture, and other objects in America's homes, despite a wealth of information that children were at risk for serious brain damage and death from ingesting this poison. This book highlights the immediate dangers ordinary citizens face because of the relentless failure of industrial polluters to warn, inform, and protect their workers and neighbors. It offers a historical analysis of how corporate control over scientific research has undermined the process of proving the links between toxic chemicals and disease. The authors also describe the wisdom, courage, and determination of workers and community members who continue to voice their concerns in spite of vicious opposition. Readable, pathbreaking, and revelatory, Deceit and denial provides crucial answers to questions of dangerous environmental degradation, escalating corporate greed, and governmental disregard for its citizens' safety and health.

A contemporary history of a critical period, Are We Ready? analyzes the impact of 9/11, the anthrax attacks that followed, and preparations for a possible smallpox attack on the nation's public health infrastructure. David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz interviewed local, state, and federal officials to determine the immediate reactions of key participants in these events. The authors explore the extent to which these emergencies permanently altered the political, cultural, and organizational life of the country and consider whether the nation is now better prepared to withstand another potentially devastating attack. This well-reasoned and well-researched book presents compelling evidence that few with hands-on experience with disease and emergency preparedness believe that an adequate response to terrorism--whether biological, chemical, or radiological--is possible without a strong and vibrant infrastructure to provide everyday services as well as emergency responses.

More than any other social scientists, Kenneth and Mamie Clark have been admired and respected as the civil rights movement's most consistent, articulate, and effective northern advocates integration. Both an intellectual biography of the Clarks and a history of the influence of their Northside Center in Harlem, Children, Race, and Power captures the vitality and confusion of progressive politics in New York in the 1950s and 1960s. If racism is America's greatest flaw, then this absorbing study of the continuing struggle to protect the children who are its most vulnerable victims in the nation's leading city and best known black community is, in many ways, a history of the struggle for the American future. The Clarks established New York's Northside Center on the edge of Harlem just after World War II. Much more than a mental-health center, it was deeply involved in many aspects of the civil rights movement: the struggle for integration of northern public education; Harlem's and New York's Wars on Poverty; the Model Cities and urban renewal efforts of the late 1960s; crises in Jewish and black relations; decentralization and community control; community action; and community mental health. At the Northside Center, some of the city's and nation's most important child-welfare advocates, black political leaders, academics, and philanthropists came together seeking common ground. Children, Race, and Power will speak strongly to those concerned about twentieth-century race relations; it is a book from which present-day policy makers, mental-health professionals, social workers, and educational administrators can learn much.