The author’s vituperation may alienate some, and her voluminous statistics may turn off others, but her demand that...
A disturbing picture of the status of AIDS in the United States and an angry claim that the country has failed utterly to confront the problem.
Hunter, a medical anthropologist who has previously written on the specter of AIDS in Africa and Asia, asserts not only that the United States has the most severe HIV epidemic of any developed country but that AIDS will soon become the worst epidemic this country will ever know. Most Americans, she says, are woefully ignorant about AIDS, still thinking of it as something that affects homosexuals and drug users, but not themselves or the people they know. To counteract this notion, she focuses on the story of Paige Swanberg, a white, middle-class woman from Montana who learned that she was HIV-positive when she tried to join the Navy and has since become an AIDS counselor. Hunter also interviewed a number of other activists and people touched by AIDS, and her text is heavily larded with their comments, some pertinent but many not. She is particularly scornful of the Christian Right, deploring its abstinence-only approach to sex education and its disinformation campaign about condoms, and she has harsh words for the Bush administration for catering to their demands. The government, she claims, has failed to protect citizens through acts of commission and omission: e.g., its “war on drugs,” with a mass-incarceration approach that promotes the spread of AIDS, as crowded prisons becoming ideal breeding grounds for drug-resistant superstrains of HIV; its cuts in funding for treatment programs; its attacks on women’s reproductive rights; its withdrawal of support for housing and food for HIV-positive Americans. Hunter is clearly outraged by what she sees, and her language reflects her wrath: a government that “doesn’t seem to give a damn”; “right-wing hatemongers” and “vote-buying liberals”; and a drug industry with a “stranglehold” on government.
The author’s vituperation may alienate some, and her voluminous statistics may turn off others, but her demand that attention be paid comes through loud and clear.Pub Date: March 28, 2006
ISBN: 1-4039-7199-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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