NOT ALL OF US ARE SAINTS: A...

NOT ALL OF US ARE SAINTS: A Doctor’s Journey Among the Poor by Dr. David Hilfiker (Ballantine: $5.99; 258 pp.) In 1983, Hilfiker quit his practice in rural Minnesota to join a religious group aiding some of the poorest people in America--two miles from the White House: “I had known there was poverty in America, but I had not been prepared to find poverty as desperate as Calcutta’s in the capital of the United States.” He faced problems unknown to most physicians: patients unable to read simple directions on medicine bottles, people battling acute substance abuse, abused women and children, the homeless. This understated journal offers a fierce indictment of the failure of the U.S. to provide its citizens with basic health care.