A vigorous argument for unified public health measures.
A pointed study of how divisiveness and conflict undermine the nation’s response to disease.
Law professor and legal historian Price offers an authoritative history of America’s flawed responses to epidemics. “Not only does the United States have the most fragmented public health system in the world,” she writes, “but most states retain antiquated public health laws that do not serve us well.” Due to poorly constructed laws and underfunded health agencies, the U.S. responds to pandemics “not as one nation, but as fifty-five smaller nations—the states, territories, and commonwealths that politically subdivide the country.” Responsibility for tuberculosis control, for example, “is divided among 2,684 state, local, and tribal health departments.” Price recounts waves of epidemics in the nation’s early years, when there was no treatment except to isolate the ill. With the discovery of a vaccine for smallpox, local, state, and federal authorities mandated vaccination, although not without controversy. Often, citizens looked for groups to blame, including immigrants, Asians, Mexicans, or even people from other states. In response to yellow fever, “shotgun quarantines” were enforced by militias or deputized volunteers. In 1900, an outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco led to the quarantine of the city’s entire Chinatown—a strategy struck down by a federal judge. The rollout of vaccines for Covid-19 echoes what occurred with the vaccine for polio in the 1950s. “Not only was there no patent on the vaccine but there was no plan in place to oversee or coordinate its distribution,” writes Price. “America’s first nationwide vaccination effort was chaotic and politically divisive, as demand for the vaccine outpaced supply.” The author effectively shows how every epidemic has generated tensions about which level of government has the authority to make public health decisions. She recommends a stronger federal role in responding to pandemics, including coordination of the nation’s primary health agencies and nationally funded coverage of the costs of testing and treatment.
A vigorous argument for unified public health measures.Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8070-4349-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
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
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