Marmot is more successful at delineating a social problem than at solving it, but he provides plenty of ammunition for those...
A close look at the health gap between the richest and better educated and those below them on the socioeconomic scale.
For more than three decades, Marmot (Epidemiology and Public Health/University Coll., London; The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity, 2004, etc.), who will become president of the World Medical Association later this year, has led research groups studying public health. His 2010 study, “Fair Society Healthy Lives,” known as the Marmot Report, proposed ways to reduce health inequalities in England. Here, the author’s canvas is broader as he looks at the social gradient in health in places across the globe, including Brazil, Finland, Eastern Europe, Cuba, Canada, the United States, and many others. Marmot argues that health is directly related to societal issues, that inequities in power, money, and resources give rise to inequities in the conditions of daily living and, thus, to inequities in health. Individual chapters deal with specific areas—child development, education, employment and working conditions, conditions for older people, and development of resilient communities—where changes would reduce health inequalities. While poverty plays a significant role in health, the author makes clear that empowerment is vitally important. Marmot’s text is largely accessible to general readers, sometimes even rather informal and occasionally chatty and personally revealing. However, the abundance of charts throughout the text is off-putting, often breaking the flow of the narrative. This supplementary material, which encapsulates textual information, might better have been placed in an appendix. Marmot’s intent is twofold: to make clear how society’s workings impact health and to point the way to a fairer society. His take-home message—“Do something. Do more. Do it better”—is succinct.
Marmot is more successful at delineating a social problem than at solving it, but he provides plenty of ammunition for those in position to tackle it.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63286-078-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
A moving essay that should find its way into the hands of all students and teachers to provoke new conversation and...
An enchanting plea by the award-winning Nigerian novelist to channel anger about gender inequality into positive change.
Employing personal experience in her examination of “the specific and particular problem of gender,” National Book Critics Circle winner Adichie (Americanah, 2013, etc.) gently and effectively brings the argument about whether feminism is still relevant to an accessible level for all readers. An edited version of a 2012 TEDxEuston talk she delivered, this brief essay moves from the personal to the general. The author discusses how she was treated as a second-class citizen back home in Nigeria (walking into a hotel and being taken for a sex worker; shut out of even family meetings, in which only the male members participate) and suggests new ways of socialization for both girls and boys (e.g., teaching both to cook). Adichie assumes most of her readers are like her “brilliant, progressive” friend Louis, who insists that women were discriminated against in the past but that “[e]verything is fine now for women.” Yet when actively confronted by an instance of gender bias—the parking attendant thanked Louis for the tip, although Adichie had been the one to give it—Louis had to recognize that men still don’t recognize a woman’s full equality in society. The example from her childhood at school in Nigeria is perhaps the most poignant, demonstrating how insidious and entrenched gender bias is and how damaging it is to the tender psyches of young people: The primary teacher enforced an arbitrary rule (“she assumed it was obvious”) that the class monitor had to be a boy, even though the then-9-year-old author had earned the privilege by winning the highest grade in the class. Adichie makes her arguments quietly but skillfully.
A moving essay that should find its way into the hands of all students and teachers to provoke new conversation and awareness.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-91176-1
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Literature knows few champions as ardent and insightful—or as uncompromising—as Gornick, which is to readers’ good fortune.
Gornick’s (The Odd Woman and the City, 2016) ferocious but principled intelligence emanates from each of the essays in this distinctive collection.
Rereading texts, and comparing her most recent perceptions against those of the past, is the linchpin of the book, with the author revisiting such celebrated novels as D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, Colette's The Vagabond, Marguerite Duras' The Lover, and Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris. Gornick also explores the history and changing face of Jewish American fiction as expressions of "the other." The author reads more deeply and keenly than most, with perceptions amplified by the perspective of her 84 years. Though she was an avatar of "personal journalism" and a former staff writer for the Village Voice—a publication that “had a muckraking bent which made its writers…sound as if they were routinely holding a gun to society’s head”—here, Gornick mostly subordinates her politics to the power of literature, to the books that have always been her intimates, old friends to whom she could turn time and again. "I read ever and only to feel the power of Life with a capital L," she writes; it shows. The author believes that for those willing to relinquish treasured but outmoded interpretations, rereading over a span of decades can be a journey, sometimes unsettling, toward richer meanings of books that are touchstones of one's life. As always, Gornick reveals as much about herself as about the writers whose works she explores; particularly arresting are her essays on Lawrence and on Natalia Ginzburg. Some may feel she has a tendency to overdramatize, but none will question her intellectual honesty. It is reflected throughout, perhaps nowhere so vividly as in a vignette involving a stay in Israel, where, try as she might, Gornick could not get past the "appalling tribalism of the culture.”
Literature knows few champions as ardent and insightful—or as uncompromising—as Gornick, which is to readers’ good fortune.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-28215-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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