Finished: Small Great Things (Picoult) A very good book that tackles the social inequity of an African American labor and delivery nurse, with over twenty years of experience, who is accused of letting a Caucasian newborn die because she has been instructed by her supervisor not to touch the baby, per the request of the white supremacist parents. Whew, that's a mouthful, and the book is an eyeful. Ruth Jefferson, a single mother to a very intelligent teenage boy, has worked hard to provide for her son since the death of his father who served our county. Ruth is determined that her son, Edison, will have all the educational advantages of his white peers. Ruth has been a practicing labor and delivery nurse at New Haven's Mercy West hospital for over twenty years..the small hospital's only African American labor and delivery nurse. She has held her tongue as a much younger and less experienced nurse was given the job as supervisor; she has turned the other cheek when people have raised their eyebrows to see that she lives in an upper class, white neighborhood; and she's kept her cool when followed through stores by salespeople who want to "keep an eye on her". When Ruth begins her shift one morning, taking over for the nurse who was with a couple when their baby was born, her life changes in ways she never expected. As Ruth goes in to assess the newborn baby boy, his parents, Turk and Brittany, cringe and are very reluctant to let her touch him. Ruth writes it off as new parent nervousness, but soon finds out differently. Within an hour, a request has been made by the parents that Ruth be reassigned and never allowed to touch their infant again! Ruth is incredulous when she reads the post it note that her supervisor pins in the chart "Infant Not To Be Touched By Any African American Nurses". Of course, since she's the only one of those, Ruth is terribly offended. She let's her disdain for the unfair treatment be known, and then she goes home for the day. Upon working a double shift the next day, Ruth is in the nursery caring for another infant when Turk and Brittany's baby, Davis, is brought in after his circumcision. Sleeping soundly due to his sedation, the new nurse asks if Ruth will look after him because she is suddenly called to the operating room for an emergency C-section. The new nurse says she'll be back in twenty minutes if Ruth will just keep an eye out on little Davis. Of course, Ruth looks over at Davis when she is alone with him and notices that he's not breathing and turning blue. She has a momentary moment of hesitation as she wonders if she SHOULD touch him to help him, and then she does just that. She jiggles his feet, a common tactic to get newborns to start breathing again, and she rubs his chest. Just then she hears her supervisor coming in from the same emergency C-section and she swaddles Davis just in time for it to appear to the supervisor that Ruth has done nothing at all to help the baby. Code blue is called and all kinds of doctors and nurses rush in. Ruth begins infant CPR on orders from the pediatrician, and after several horrific minutes of trying to resuscitate the baby, he is pronounced dead. Unknowingly to all the medical personnel, the parents have been standing in the doorway and witness the horror. Too many details in the book to recap it all, but the bottom line is that the parents accuse the n-word of having it out for them and purposely killing their son. :-( Ruth is arrested and goes to trial. Her lawyer, Kennedy McQuarrie, is one who is appointed since Ruth can't afford an attorney. Kennedy is a young, white, smart-as-a-whip attorney, who is also a young mother, who has never been allowed to take a murder case for the public defender's office yet. After meeting Ruth, she begs to be given the case, and her boss agrees. Kennedy considers herself completely unprejudiced, but after spending a day with Ruth once she's out on bail, Ruth manages to make the point that even though she's worked hard to put herself and her son in a better environment, she is still treated like a lesser being. Kennedy and Ruth develop quite the friendship, though with its ups and downs, as the pre-trial and then the trial gets going. Ruth also struggles with Edison as he suddenly begins skipping school and putting his potential college career in jeopardy. We also read the view point of Turk, as we learn the history of how he became a white supremacist, how he met the "leader" of his group's daughter, Brittany, and married her with her father's blessing. Brittany is one little bad-ass white supremacist herself, and has no problem with the idea of just running over a black person if need be. They are truly awful people. We follow them all as the trial proceeds and we wonder whether Kennedy will really be able to get Ruth acquitted, especially after Ruth insists on taking the stand and explaining to the jury how it feels to be a black woman in a white person's world...something Kennedy is vehemently against her doing. Anyway, in the end, the jury is hung, but the judge, who Kennedy has had two losses with, who really doesn't like Kennedy, rather than declaring a mistrial and putting everyone through the whole ordeal again, he acquits Ruth. He states that he was able to sees clearly that she was not at fault. Basically the big defense argument was that the baby had a metabolic condition that was life-threatening, but that, because he was born near the weekend, was not relayed to the doctors by the lab after his little routine heel stick, until it was too late. If they'd been notified sooner, they would never have had him fast before the circumcision due to his condition, and would have had an intravenous sugar solution flowing through his little body. In other words, there wasn't much that could have been done to save little Davis. The judge apparently has the right to make the decision whether or not to interpret the testimony himself and acquit or call for a re-trial. He thankfully acquits!  The kicker at the end of the book is this....when Kennedy is putting away her notes on the case, she takes a last look at Davis' lab results and realizes there's something else written on the back that none of them even looked at. They all stopped when they got to his metabolic condition and went with that. It turns out that Davis was a sickle cell carrier, which is very rare in Caucasian babies, but very prevalent in African American babies. Kennedy does a little digging and finds out that Brittany's father, who has raised her by himself, always saying that her mother cheated on him and left, had in reality had Brittany with a black woman!!! When confronted with the facts, the father, this supreme being of the white supremacy movement, doesn't deny it and Brittany and Turk both go into a tailspin. Brittany is half black!! Brittany, unable to handle the thought of one drop of black blood in her body, kills herself. Turk, realizing how much he loves Brittany no matter what, begins to question everything he's been taught his whole life. He realizes that if his baby were alive he would be part black, and that would be ok with him as long as his baby was alive. Turk completely turns his life around, remarries a couple of years later, and has a little girl. He spends his time going on the lecture circuit to talk against white supremacy and racism...the very ideals he was brought up with that began the entire ordeal with Ruth. Edison goes on the graduate from Yale, and Ruth furthers her degree, becomes a nurse practitioner and opens her own clinic with money that she most likely won from the hospital when Kennedy filed a wrongful termination suit against them. A very good book that really does make you step back and see that still in this day and age, we have so very far to go in terms of us all becoming truly color blind.