A broad-ranging, insightful analysis of the complex practical and ethical issues involved in global health.
Guardian columnist Wolff (Philosophy/University College London; Ethics and Public Policy, 2011 etc.) poses a challenging but essential question: “How can there be a human right to health if the resources are just not there to satisfy it?”
Before addressing the current global health crisis, the author looks back at Franklin Roosevelt's 1941 speech in which he asserted that the “four freedoms”—freedom of speech and worship, and freedom from fear and want—are basic human rights. In 1945, the first UN Charter included provisions for human rights, in 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed and during the same period the World Health Organization came into existence. The protection of human rights became international law in 1976. This is the context for the definition of “right to health” as a human right protected under international law, although its implications are still under debate. Does it include free access to condoms and abortion, or the right of developing nations to produce affordable pharmaceuticals in violation of patents? Wolff uses the HIV/AIDS epidemic as a case study—from its discovery in 1981 to the fight over funding to support research and guarantee that sufferers have access to treatment. He writes about how international efforts to deal with the spread of AIDS to Haiti and Africa were derailed by a “catastrophic” change in World Bank policies in the 1980s, when the Bank, and the IMF, insisted that developing countries seeking aid cut back public-sector expenditures. Just as these constraints were being reversed, the World Trade Organization demanded that members cease violating patents by producing low-cost generic pharmaceuticals. While the author describes the struggle to establish the right to universal health as a work in progress, he is cautiously optimistic.
A broad-ranging, insightful analysis of the complex practical and ethical issues involved in global health.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-06335-6
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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