Overview

North Lawndale, a neighborhood that lies in the shadows of Chicago's Loop, is surrounded by some of the city's finest medical facilities, Yet, it is one of the sickest, most medically underserved communities in the country. Mama Might Be Better Off Dead immerses listeners in the lives of four generations of a poor, African-American family in the neighborhood, who are beset with the devastating illnesses that are all too common in America's inner-cities. Headed by Jackie Banes, who oversees the care of a diabetic grandmother, a husband on kidney dialysis, an ailing father, and three children, the Banes family contends with countless medical crises. From visits to emergency rooms and dialysis units, to trials with home care, to struggles for Medicaid eligibility, Laurie Kaye Abraham chronicles their access--or more often, lack thereof--to medical care. Their story reveals an inadequate health care system that is further undermined by the direct and indirect effects of poverty. Both disturbing and illuminating, Mama Might Be Better Off Dead is an unsettling, profound look at the human face of health care in America. Published to great acclaim in 1993, the book in this new edition includes an incisive foreword by David Ansell, a physician who worked at Mt. Sinai Hospital, where much of the Banes family's narrative unfolds.

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"Laurie Kaye Abraham is a freelance writer and senior editor of New York Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. David A. Ansell, MD, MPH, is a Chicago-based physician and health activist. He has been an internal medicine physician since training at Cook County Hospital in the late 1970s where he spent seventeen years holding a number of positions including chief of general medicine / primary care. After leaving County, he spent ten years as chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital located in one of the poorest communities in Chicago. Now chief medical officer at Rush University Medical Center, he also sees patients and teaches. Since coming to Chicago to train at Cook County Hospital, he has dedicated his career to fighting health inequity by building programs to address and eliminate these disparities. His work with others has led to the end of ""patient dumping"" in the United States, one of the first cancer screening programs in America aimed at addressing the Black: White breast cancer mortality disparity, the creation of the most prominent health disparity research and intervention center in Chicago, and the creation of the Metropolitan Chicago Breast Cancer Taskforce, a not-for-profit dedicated to the elimination of breast cancer mortality disparity. In his spare time he reads, gardens, and exercises. He volunteers as a doctor at a Chicago free clinic and has participated in ongoing medical missions to the Dominican Republic and Haiti. He is married to a doctor and has two children. Lisa Renee Pitts is an award-winning actress in theater, television, and film, as well as an accomplished audiobook narrator. She has been seen Off-Broadway, in Europe, and in regional theaters across the United States, performing leading roles in such prominent plays as A Raisin in the Sun, Doubt, Waiting for Lefty, Valley Song, and Our Town. Her television appearances include The Shield and Law and Order, and she played the recurring role of Allison Sawyer on the hit family drama Lincoln Heights for the ABC Family Channel. Lisa's audiobook titles include biographies, fiction, nonfiction and children's novels, including Pushkin and the Queen of Spades by Alice Randall, for which she won an AudioFile Earphones Award for excellence in narration. Other notable titles are Left to Tell by Immaculee Ilibagiza, Better Than I Know Myself by Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant, and My Name Is Not Angelica by Scott O'Dell. Lisa is a graduate of Rutgers University, where she received her B.F.A. in Theater Arts. She lives in Burbank, California."

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