Standpipe, Delivering Water in Flint
A 2022 Michigan Notable Book
BELT/ 2021
Standpipe is a brief, elegant memoir of the author's work as a Red Cross volunteer delivering emergency water to residents of Flint, Michigan. A collection of short essays and vignettes, Standpipe sets the struggles of a city in crisis against the author's personal journey as his mother declines into dementia and eventual death, just before the emergency is declared in Flint. Written with a poet's eye for detail and quiet metaphor, Standpipe is an intimate look at one man's engagement with both civic and familial trauma.
Standpipe is an exceptional and useful book for our times. At once, it is a knight's tale of unsullied ideals, of Dave Hardin's quest to deliver clean water to the poisoned citizens of Flint; but it is also the tale of submerged American populations, American migrants of many colors and beliefs journeying within our own country, and come (somehow) to fitful rest in America's vast, often indifferent middle." —Richard Ford |