A clear, compact, and well-researched study of immigrant health care issues.
Reimann and Rodríguez-Reimann offer a concise overview of the issues associated with immigrant health care.
In this entry in the Immigrant Strides Toward Prosperity series, the authors (Reimann is a clinical psychologist, Rodríguez-Reimann an executive at the Group for Immigrant Resettlement and Assessment) survey a broad array of the health challenges facing immigrants in their new environments. They touch on major physical issues, including tuberculosis and Covid-19, as well as the range of mental issues associated with stress (including PTSD) related to various autoimmune disorders. (“Experiencing continuous stress in which the body releases adrenaline over a longer period of time can result in continuous inflammation and other health issues. For example, chronic stress can create a physical process that leads to type 2 diabetes.”) The authors also discuss seemingly more mundane matters, such as proper dental care, noting that “even small differences in healthcare practices between countries can sow confusion.” Reimann and Rodríguez-Reimann detail the numerous psychological problems that many immigrants face when dealing with unresolved grief or trauma stemming from displacement, rape, or torture, and they stress the importance of community health workers (CHWs), known as promotoras, in bridging the gap between cultures; they note that community leaders with some health care knowledge can connect immigrant groups with health care providers. The authors also include brief insets with health care stories drawn from their personal experiences, a glossary of medical terms, and a full and detailed reference section. Reimann and Rodríguez-Reimann write with clarity and obvious knowledge, and their comprehensive approach will make this book an invaluable starting point for people working at all levels of immigrant health care. The book’s overall tone of informed hope is uplifting; with the world’s immigrant population continuing to rise every year, the need for books like this will become increasingly pressing to everybody on the front lines of overburdened health care services.
A clear, compact, and well-researched study of immigrant health care issues.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781955658164
Page Count: 186
Publisher: Romo Books
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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