dr. mona hanna-attisha, thank you so much for joining us. >> thank you so much for having me. >> so if drmona is a physician/writer, well, my next guest is a journalist/novelist. jennifer egan is considered top of the new-wave american authors. she won a pulitzer for her book book "a visit from the goon squad" and accolades for her hard-hitting journalism on subjects like child mental illness. and recently opioid addiction among young american mothers. her new novel "manhattan beach, looks at live for women workers in new york in the 1940s during a time when the war and great depression had radically changed the fabric of society and the face of america's workforce. she joined me to talk about all of this from new york. jennifer egan, welcome to the program. >> thank you so much. >> so we're talking to you in light of your latest novel, "manhattan beach," having been selected for the new york city wide book club. so why did you decide to do this particular story not just about the place, but about a woman's place in that wartime story, in that all-male bastion of the naval yards? >> well,

dr. mona hanna-attisha is a pediatrician in flint. shook the denial off the flint story and made people face what was going on there. congratulations on the book. thank you for being here. >> thank you for having me. it's good to be back. >> i wanted to ask first of all about why you wanted to write a book about this. the reason i wanted to ask you is you are busy. not only were you busy before flint, since then you got a lot of national attention and a big platform you've been using for good but you're still trying to fix flint. >> i'm still a pediatrician in flint. i decided to write it for three reasons. one, when i started to write the book, i knew we would need a vehicle to shine the spotlight back on flint. the nation's attention would fade but our crisis and needs would be ongoing. we needed a reminder that flint is still here. it's still on bottled water. you need to pay attention to flint. the second reason is, i wanted an immigrant story of an arab-american that wasn't about war and terrorism. it was about immigrant coming t

dr. hanna-attisha joins us. this became such a personal story for you.elling your young patients and parents it's okay to drink this water. >> kids would come into the clinic. is the water okay? can i give this to my child? can i mix my baby's formula with this water? and we were reassuring them, yes, it's okay. how could the water that comes out of your tap not be okay. >> how did you find out there was a problem? >> it happened very much by serendipity. i was at home with a high school girlfriend drinking a glass of wine having a barbecue. my high school girlfriend happens to be a water expert and she was the first person who mentioned to me the water wasn't being treated properly and because of that, there would be lead in the water. >> your research found that the lead levels in children's blood doubled and even tripled after this 2014 switch in the river water. how did that occur? explain the biology behind it. >> absolutely. the flint water wasn't treated properly. it was leeching lead into the drinking water which got into the bodies of our childr

dr. mona hanna-attisha, the american pediatrician who blew the lid off the flint, michigan, poison waterns me with her new book, and its devastating account. and jennifer egan, the pulitzer prize-winning novelist, whose latest work "manhattan beach" shines a light on the thousands of women who heroically manned the naval shipyard during world war ii. >>> good evening, everyone, and