Stephen Bezruchka has worked in the healthcare field for over 50 years. A graduate of Stanford Medical School, with a public health degree from Johns Hopkins University, Bezruchka began his career by setting up a community health project in the Himalayas.

He spent over 30 years practicing as an emergency physician in the United States before joining the faculty of the School of Public Health at the University of Washington in 1994.

Such experience gives him a unique vantage point when it comes to examining the state of the nation’s health. Bezruchka’s new book, Born Sick in the USA, comes with a diagnosis: America, your health could be a lot better. “Our nation has misguided priorities, so we live shorter, less healthy lives,” he noted.

“The root cause of our shorter and sicker lives is the huge economic inequality we tolerate, together with a lack of attention to our early years, when so much of our lifelong outlook for health and well-being is shaped,” said Bezruchka, adding that residents of the United States die younger than those in more than 40 other countries around the world.

Other countries address matters that the United States neglects. Maternity leave for mothers, daycare, and universal healthcare are examples of that, he stated. The U.S. government already spends more on healthcare per person than any nation that has universal healthcare, so we can afford the single-payer system without additional costs, noted Bezruchka.

But whether you call it Medicare for All or the Public Option, a universal system won’t solve all our health problems. As long as so many Americans are living in poverty, the nation’s health will suffer, he said.

Change requires a strategy to tackle the enormous economic inequality that exists in America, said Bezruchka. “Once people realize that they don’t live the longer, healthier lives that people in other nations do, we must change the status quo and decrease inequality, and use the proceeds to support early life. Large public support for improving health through massive demonstrations and a far-reaching media campaign can result in profound changes, such as the demonstrations that ended the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. Massive social movements are the forces we need now,” he said.

Bezruchka advocates people find one-liners to help in the campaign to influence others. Examples in the book include "Inequality kills" and "Americans have the right to life, but it is only a short one." The author said his bumper sticker reads, "Don't believe everything you think!"

To provide more ideas on addressing the nation’s inequality problem, Bezruchka has made his previous book, Inequality Kills Us All: COVID-19's Health Lessons for the World, available online free of charge at his website stephenbezruchka.com.

Benita VanWinkle likes going to the movies. She’s gone to theaters in every state of the union. But she doesn’t always stay for the main feature.

Instead, VanWinkle, an art professor at High Point University in North Carolina, pursues a picture show of her own. Over the years, she’s photographed some 1,200 theaters across the country.

Almost 400 of those pictures make up her new book, America’s Hometown Movie Theaters: Please Remain Standing.

It all started at her hometown theater near Largo, Fla. She had a college photo assignment and decided that the ornate theater she knew as a kid would make a great subject with its interior artwork of the history of sound and motion in movies with Egyptian characters and symbols (“They scared me as a kid.”)

Part of the title of her book comes from Clarence, the former Marine who ran that Largo theater and always played the “Stars and Stripes” before every movie. “If you didn’t stand up, he would stop the film and put the house lights on until people stood up,” said VanWinkle. Sadly, two years after taking her pictures, the theater was torn down by the bank next door, she said.

It was later in graduate school at Southern Illinois University that VanWinkle made shooting movie houses her graduate project and her life’s passion. “At first, I just shot theaters in Illinois. I’d stop in every small town and ask people if they had a theater or knew of any in the area,” she said.

Soon she developed her own databank of movie houses. In addition to acquiring theater directories from different decades, she welcomed the Cinema Treasures website that started in 2003. “That was a history of theaters, a crowdsourcing project where people could provide additional details. That changed my life,” she said.

“I will shoot abandoned theaters if I come across them, but I don’t focus on that,” she said. She credited photographer Matt Lambros, author of After the Final Curtain: The Fall of the American Movie Theater, with doing amazing work in the abandoned theater category. “I put more energy into theaters that are maintained, rebuilt, refurbished, or repurposed,” said VanWinkle.

One of the most distinctive examples of a repurposed theater is in Kearney, Neb., she said. The old Fort Theatre is now a dentist's office but while the theater seats have been taken out, the place remains in good enough shape that it could be made into a theater again. Ironically, a popcorn machine and candy display, the very things that often drive one to the dentist, are displayed in the building’s front window, she said.

Kearney is also home to the World Theatre, a nonprofit, volunteer-run theater, said VanWinkle, who’s come to know a lot about what communities around the country are doing with their theaters. In Viborg, S.D., a town of only 350 people, she photographed the Lund Theatre, where she captured the image of a four-year-old looking out through the theater’s glass door just as she snapped a picture of the theater’s exterior.

VanWinkle also told of the art teacher, “a one-woman tornado,” who organizes a rummage sale twice a year to benefit the State Theater in Nashville, Ill. “I love hearing from people,” she said, referring to tips she gets on movie houses she hasn’t photographed yet.

Her book is on the street, but VanWinkle still makes the rounds of movie houses with a camera in hand. This summer, she plans to visit the Russell Theatre in Maysville, Ky., the Maynard Arts Center just outside Boston, and the Little Theatre in Rochester, N.Y.

The Little Theatre is one she’s been to before. When the pandemic hit, the theater backers decided it was a good time to overhaul a theater built in 1929. VanWinkle was there to photograph the project when it was completed.

Today, the Little Theatre runs a mix of indie and foreign films, rotating art displays, and music, along with a casual cafe. One of the customer comments online raves about real butter on the popcorn and “generous home-baked desserts at great prices.”

When it comes to rave reviews, VanWinkle credits her editor, Beth Daugherty, founder of Bauer & Dean Publishers, a firm that specializes in architectural books, with bringing her book to life. “It wouldn’t have happened without her,” she said.

As for her next project, VanWinkle’s not sure if it will be a comprehensive look at theaters in Chicago, or another volume of movie houses from around the country (after all, she has 800 pictures that haven't been used yet). But whatever it is, she’s a believer in the power of entertainment as a group activity rather than a solitary exercise in front of a TV set.

Don’t expect a big celebration on Juneteenth (June 19) from author Clyde W. Ford, who explains in A High Price for Freedom.

“What a wonderful day that first Juneteenth must have been. Fetters gone. Shackles removed. Whips silenced. Uninformed formerly enslaved men and women reveling in their newly-found freedom. But there’s a problem with this idyllic picture of Juneteenth—most of the above events never happened, even though they are taken as unquestioned truth by Americans Black and white,” stated Ford.

The facts, the author declares, are that, first of all, slaves in Texas were aware of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. “We had papers just like we have now,” said Felix Haywood, a former slave who was in Texas for the first Juneteenth, when interviewed in the 1930s at the age of 92. The 2,000 Union troops that went to Texas after the Civil War didn’t go to tell the slaves they were free, but to remind the white Texas slaveholders that they had to release those they continued to enslave, said Ford.

Texas is where a lot of slaves wound up because, during the Civil War, a number of southern slaveholders marched as many as 150,000 Black men and women to Texas in order to keep them out of the Union Army’s hands, stated Ford, describing that movement as the second slavery trail of tears. The first one involved the transfer of slaves from tobacco states like Virginia and Maryland to the deep South in the 1830s when cotton became the chief crop.

At about the same time that Major General George Granger was delivering his Juneteenth message to Texan slaveholders, President Andrew Johnson, having taken over that spring for the assassinated Abraham Lincoln, was derailing compensation plans for slaves worked out while Lincoln was still in office.

“Union General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton seemed to recognize that President Lincoln needed a plan to deal with the four to five million men and women who would be freed by the Emancipation Proclamation if the Union prevailed in the war,” noted Ford.

Rev. Garrison Frazier, himself a former slave, replied to questions from Sherman and Stanton on the evening of Jan. 12, 1865 at a meeting that sought to find an answer to a looming problem as the war drew to a close: the huge population of former slaves “We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it or make it our own,” said Frazier.

Four days after the meeting, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, accepted by Lincoln and otherwise known as “40 acres and a mule,” said Ford. That order sought to redistribute 400,000 acres of prime Southern coastline to emancipated slaves, land that formerly belonged to Southern slaveholders. The plan was to allow African Americans to organize and govern their own communities, Ford said.

But Johnson had other ideas. Shortly after Lincoln died in April 1865, Johnson issued 14,000 pardons to wealthy Southern slaveholders, and, within seven weeks of taking office, coinciding almost exactly with the first Juneteenth, Johnson rescinded Special Field Order No. 15.

Any lands that had been confiscated were returned to their original owners, said Ford, recalling a quote from W.E.B. DuBois: “The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again toward slavery.”

By June 1865, 40,000 Black Americans who had been awarded land were formally displaced, forced into becoming sharecroppers and tenant farmers.

“Personally, as a Black Man, I find it very difficult to celebrate Juneteenth because what are we celebrating?” asked Ford. “Are you celebrating the fact that Black folks learned they were free? They already knew that. Or are you celebrating the fact that white folks were told to stop killing and brutalizing Black folks?"

A High Price for Freedom features a number of other essays by Ford addressing the struggle for freedom by African Americans in the United States.