Health Equity
Showing all 17 results
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Infected
How Power, Politics, and Privilege Use Science Against the World’s Most Vulnerable$29.99A paradigm-shifting exploration of the politics of health around the world, by an award-winning scientist
“Zaman’s optimism . . . is welcome. . . . His sense of urgency is irresistible.”
—The Wall Street Journal on Muhammad H. Zaman’s The Biography of ResistanceIn this groundbreaking new book, award-winning scientist and author Muhammad H. Zaman delves into the history of infectious disease and related policies in the United States since the dawn of germ theory, from cholera and meningitis to the recent COVID crisis, to show how vulnerable communities have been harmed in the name of research or disease control.
Infected is the epic story of compromised doctors, politicians, and the heroes who challenged them. Zaman shows that exclusionary immigration acts, the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the development of biological weapons, the fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan, and the rhetoric around the COVID-19 pandemic are all parts of the same deeper story—one of medical science intertwined with power and politics.
This is a story that continues today, in poor nations that have long been impacted by foreign policy, and at the borders, where asylum seekers are denied lifesaving medicines regardless of the party in power. Melding science and history, Infected presents infection as a key to understanding our recent past, present, and future.
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Light Up the Night
America’s Overdose Crisis and the Drug Users Fighting for Survival$26.99A revelatory, moving narrative that offers a harrowing critique of the war on drugs from voices seldom heard in the conversation: drug users who are working on the front lines to reduce overdose deaths
Media coverage has established a clear narrative of the overdose crisis: In the 1990s, pharmaceutical corporations flooded America with powerful narcotics while lying about their risk; many patients developed addictions to prescription opioids; then, as access was restricted, waves of people turned to the streets and began using heroin and, later, the dangerous synthetic opioid fentanyl.
But that’s not the whole story. It fails to acknowledge how the war on drugs has exacerbated the crisis and leaves out one crucial voice: that of drug users themselves.
Across the country, people who use drugs are organizing in response to a record number of overdose deaths. They are banding together to save lives and demanding equal rights. Set against the backdrop of the overdose crisis, Light Up the Night provides an intimate look at how users navigate the policies that criminalize them. It chronicles a rising movement that’s fighting to save lives, end stigma, and inspire commonsense policy reform.
Told through embedded reporting focused on two activists, Jess Tilley in Massachusetts and Louise Vincent in North Carolina, this is the story of the courageous people stepping in where government has failed. They are standing on the front lines of an underground effort to help people with addictions use drugs safely, reduce harms, and live with dignity.
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Teeth
The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America$23.00 – $27.99Winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize
An NPR Best Book of 2017
"[Teeth is] . . . more than an exploration of a two-tiered system—it is a call for sweeping, radical change."
—New York Times Book Review"Show me your teeth," the great naturalist Georges Cuvier is credited with saying, "and I will tell you who you are." In this shattering new work, veteran health journalist Mary Otto looks inside America’s mouth, revealing unsettling truths about our unequal society.
Teeth takes readers on a disturbing journey into America’s silent epidemic of oral disease, exposing the hidden connections between tooth decay and stunted job prospects, low educational achievement, social mobility, and the troubling state of our public health. Otto’s subjects include the pioneering dentist who made Shirley Temple and Judy Garland’s teeth sparkle on the silver screen and helped create the all-American image of "pearly whites"; Deamonte Driver, the young Maryland boy whose tragic death from an abscessed tooth sparked congressional hearings; and a marketing guru who offers advice to dentists on how to push new and expensive treatments and how to keep Medicaid patients at bay.
In one of its most disturbing findings, Teeth reveals that toothaches are not an occasional inconvenience, but rather a chronic reality for millions of people, including disproportionate numbers of the elderly and people of color. Many people, Otto reveals, resort to prayer to counteract the uniquely devastating effects of dental pain.
Otto also goes back in time to understand the roots of our predicament in the history of dentistry, showing how it became separated from mainstream medicine, despite a century of growing evidence that oral health and general bodily health are closely related.
Muckraking and paradigm-shifting, Teeth exposes for the first time the extent and meaning of our oral health crisis. It joins the small shelf of books that change the way we view society and ourselves—and will spark an urgent conversation about why our teeth matter.
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Foodopoly
The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America$19.95 – $26.95“A terrific primer on the corporate control of food in the United States, and the actions of those who fight back” (Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved), Foodopoly takes aim at the real culprit behind America’s food crisis: the ever-growing consolidation and corporatization of food production, which prevents farmers from raising healthy crops and limits the choices that people can make in the grocery store.
In the tradition of the bestselling The World According to Monsanto, Foodopoly tells the shocking story of how agricultural policy has been hijacked by lobbyists, driving out independent farmers and food processors in favor of companies such as Cargill, Tyson, Kraft, and ConAgra. “A meticulously documented account of how we have lost control of our food system” (Steve Gliessman, professor emeritus of agroecology, UC-Santa Cruz), the book demonstrates how the impacts ripple far and wide, from economic stagnation in rural communities at home to famines in poor countries overseas. In the end, author Wenonah Hauter argues that solving this crisis will require a complete structural shift, a grassroots movement to reshape our food system from seed to table—a change that is about politics, not just personal choice.
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Fatal Invention
How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century$19.99 – $25.00An incisive, groundbreaking book that examines how a biological concept of race is a myth that promotes inequality in a supposedly “post-racial” era.
Though the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race, the emerging fields of personalized medicine, reproductive technologies, genetic genealogy, and DNA databanks are attempting to resuscitate race as a biological category written in our genes.
This groundbreaking book by legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts examines how the myth of race as a biological concept—revived by purportedly cutting-edge science, race-specific drugs, genetic testing, and DNA databases—continues to undermine a just society and promote inequality in a supposedly “post-racial” era. Named one of the ten best black nonfiction books 2011 by AFRO.com, Fatal Invention offers a timely and “provocative analysis” (Nature) of race, science, and politics that “is consistently lucid . . . alarming but not alarmist, controversial but evidential, impassioned but rational” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
“Everyone concerned about social justice in America should read this powerful book.” —Anthony D. Romero, executive director, American Civil Liberties Union
“A terribly important book on how the ‘fatal invention’ has terrifying effects in the post-genomic, ‘post-racial’ era.” —Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, professor of sociology, Duke University, and author of Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States
“Fatal Invention is a triumph! Race has always been an ill-defined amalgam of medical and cultural bias, thinly overlaid with the trappings of contemporary scientific thought. And no one has peeled back the layers of assumption and deception as lucidly as Dorothy Roberts.” —Harriet A. Washington, author of and Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself
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Gristle
From Factory Farms to Food Safety (Thinking Twice About the Meat We Eat)$14.95The musician and activist offers “a collection of compelling, well-researched essays . . . shining light on the world of agribusiness” and Big Meat (Publishers Weekly).
For everyone from omnivores to vegans, this eye-opening guide offers food for thought on today’s meat industry. Moby, renowned musician and passionate vegan, and Miyun Park, leading food policy activist, bring together experts from diverse backgrounds including: farming, workers’ rights activism, professional athletics, science, environmental sustainability, food business, and animal welfare advocacy. Together, they eloquently lay out how industrial animal agriculture unnecessarily harms workers, communities, the environment, our health, our wallets, and animals.
In the tradition of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Gristle combines hard-hitting facts with a light touch and includes informative charts and illustrations depicting the stark realities of America’s industrial food system.
Contributors include:
- Brendan Brazier
- Lauren Bush
- Christine Chavez and Julie Chavez Rodriguez
- Michael Greger, MD
- Sara Kubersky and Tom O’Hagan
- Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé
- John Mackey
- Danielle Nierenberg and Meredith Niles
- Wayne Pacelle
- Paul and Phyllis Willis
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The Body Hunters
Testing New Drugs on the World's Poorest Patients$16.95 – $24.95Hailed by John le Carré as “an act of courage on the part of its author” and singled out for praise by the leading medical journals in the United States and the United Kingdom, The Body Hunters uncovers the real-life story behind le Carré’s acclaimed novel The Constant Gardener and the feature film based on it.
“A trenchant exposé . . . meticulously researched and packed with documentary evidence” (Publishers Weekly), Sonia Shah’s riveting journalistic account shines a much-needed spotlight on a disturbing new global trend. Drawing on years of original research and reporting in Africa and Asia, Shah examines how the multinational pharmaceutical industry, in its quest to develop lucrative drugs, has begun exporting its clinical research trials to the developing world, where ethical oversight is minimal and desperate patients abound. As the New England Journal of Medicine notes, “it is critical that those engaged in drug development, clinical research and its oversight, research ethics, and policy know about these stories,” which tell of an impossible choice being faced by many of the world’s poorest patients—be experimented upon or die for lack of medicine.
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The Impact of Inequality
How to Make Sick Societies Healthier$17.95 – $17.99A “powerful and provocative” inquiry into the relationship between societies’ inequality and their citizens’ health, happiness and well-being (Lisa Berkman, Harvard School of Public Health).
Comparing the United States with other market democracies, and one American state with another, this book presents irrefutable evidence that inequality is a driver of poor health, social conflict, and violence. Pioneering social scientist Richard Wilkinson addresses the growing feeling—so common in the United States—that modern societies, despite their material success, are social failures. The Impact of Inequality explains why inequality has such devastating effects on the quality and length of our lives.
Wilkinson shows that inequality leads to stress, which in turn creates sickness on the individual and mass level. As a consequence, society suffers widespread unhappiness and high levels of violence, depression, and mistrust across the social spectrum. With persuasive evidence and fascinating analysis, the diagnosis is clear: Social and political equality are essential to improving life for everyone. Wilkinson argues that even small reductions in inequality can make an important difference—for, as this book explains, social relations are always built on material foundations.
“This new book, a wonderful work of synthesis, brings insight into how conditions of society impact on people’s daily lives. . . . It is a stimulating and exciting book.” —Sir Michael Marmot, author of The Status Syndrome
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The Health of Nations
Why Inequality Is Harmful to Your Health$16.95 – $25.95Praised by The Lancet, which called it a “lucid account that . . . deserves to be read by everybody interested in the politics of health,” and the New England Journal of Medicine, The Health of Nations provides powerful evidence that growing inequality is undermining health, welfare, and community life in America. The book’s prizewinning authors also make an urgent argument for social justice as a necessary vehicle for the betterment of society.
The Health of Nations is the synthesis of years of groundbreaking research on the connections between social structures and health and welfare, and one which Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen says “has much to offer in reshaping the agenda of the debate on health care.” Now in a revised edition which includes a new afterword, it dramatically demonstrates that growing inequalities, far from being a benign by-product of capitalism, threaten the very freedoms that economic development is thought to bring about.
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I Die, but the Memory Lives on
$14.95 – $14.99“A deeply moving account of Henning Mankell’s personal responses to AIDS and its victims, both parents and children left behind far too soon.” —Archbishop Desmond Tutu
The internationally famous creator of the bestselling Kurt Wallander mysteries tells the true story of a heartrending tradition spawned by a major health crisis: the invaluable Memory Book Project, which gives those dying of AIDS an opportunity to record their lives in words and pictures for the children they leave behind.
In Uganda, Mankell finds village after village populated only by children and the elderly—those left behind after AIDS swept away an entire generation. These slim, intensely personal volumes can contain words, pictures, a pressed butterfly, or even grains of sand as ways to represent the lives lost to this devastating plague. Excerpts from Ugandan memory books appear throughout I Die, but My Memory Lives On and, together with Mankell’s narrative, they tell the stories of individual lives while sounding a powerful warning about the threat of AIDS.
Featuring a foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the book includes an appendix listing AIDS organizations and resources. A portion of the book’s proceeds will be donated to AIDS charities in Africa. -
The Monster at Our Door
$21.99 – $25.99The MacArthur Fellow and author of Dead Cities presents a terrifying forecast of a new global threat—and “its argument is irrefutable” (The Independent).
Hailed by The Nation as a “master of disaster prose,” author and activist Mike Davis addresses the imminent catastrophe of Avian influenza. In 1918, a pandemic strain of influenza killed at least forty million people in three months. Now, leading researchers believe, another global outbreak is all but inevitable.
A virus of astonishing lethality, known as H5N1, has become entrenched in the poultry and wild bird populations of East Asia. It kills two out of every three people it infects. The World Health Organization warns that it is on the verge of mutating into a super-contagious pandemic form that could visit several billion homes within two years.
In this urgent and alarming book, Mike Davis reconstructs the scientific and political history of a viral apocalypse in the making, exposing the central roles of agribusiness and the fast-food industries, abetted by corrupt governments, in creating the ecological conditions for the emergence of this new plague. -
Hooked
Five Addicts Challenge Our Misguided Drug Rehab System$21.95“Deeply felt, deftly rendered, stunningly informative and often enraging” (Publishers Weekly), Hooked appears as we are finally waking up to the inadequacies of our current drug-rehab policies. With court-mandated rehab being debated across the country, Shavelson’s in-depth look at the struggles of five addicts as they travel through the treatment maze makes a powerful case for reform.
Highly readable and shaped by Shavelson’s experience as a journalist and physician, Hooked takes us through the anguishing “intake” and controversial House meetings, inside counselors’ and judges’ offices where many treatment decisions are made, and to prison cells where, under current policies, many addicts end up. It explores the links between drug addiction, mental illness, and trauma, including child abuse—links often ignored by current rehab efforts—and argues for an integrated approach that treats the roots of drug abuse, not just the behavior itself.
Hailed as “compelling” and “heartbreaking” (Time Out), Hooked offers a provocative, honest look at the seemingly intractable issue of drug addiction, and offers powerful alternatives to our current policies.
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Nothing to Hide
Mental Illness in the Family$29.95 – $59.95One in five Americans has a mental illness. Nothing to Hide, a stunning tribute to the millions of families for whom mental illness is a part of everyday life, juxtaposes first-person accounts with beautifully reproduced duotone photographs of forty-four families who defy the stigma of mental illness to speak for themselves about their lives, their illnesses, and their struggles to get well.
Each family in the book is portrayed in two ways: Photographs capture the members together and, often, singly or in pairs. Individual statements—usually one from each person in the family—complete the family picture by telling the story from various points of view. The families, different in many ways, have in common an ongoing struggle with illnesses ranging from schizophrenia and bipolar illness to obsessive compulsive disorder and major depression. These open and candid stories show us that the mentally ill and their families have much in common with the rest of us. They can be found in every community of America, and represent the full range of our economic, racial, and ethnic diversity. Only a small percentage of the mentally ill live with caretakers or in treatment centers.
In her foreword, MacArthur Award–winning author and psychologist Kay R. Jamison calculates the enormous costs of stigmatizing the mentally ill. And an introduction by Kenneth Duckworth, medical director for the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, details our current understanding of mental illness. The book concludes with a moving personal essay by Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post journalist David Maraniss.
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The Society and Population Health Reader: Volume II
$19.95 – $40.00 -
The Society and Population Health Reader: Volume I
$19.95 -
Epidemic!
The World of Infectious Diseases$19.95Leading experts explain infectious disease in an illustrated companion to the acclaimed American Museum of Natural History’s exhibit. Epidemic! explores the world of infectious disease with essays by Nobel Prize-winning experts, profiles of scientists and researchers, and case studies. Written for the general reader, Epidemic! offers a clear understanding of the threat of infectious diseases, from the flu and mad cow disease to HIV and tuberculosis. Leaders of organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control cover topics from controlling outbreaks and the emergence of new diseases to the problem of drug resistance. Individual case studies explore disease around the world, including the work of Doctors Without Borders, the cultural dimension of malaria, solving the riddle of cholera, and the race to find the AIDS virus. Published to coincide with the American Museum of Natural History’s traveling exhibit called “the most impressive and informative exhibition the Museum has mounted in years” (New York Times), this book illustrates the important issues of diagnosis, treatment, and prevention throughout history and across cultures with more than eighty photographs and images. A resource section includes lists of organizations and Web sites, an annotated bibliography, and a glossary. Examining infectious disease from a natural history perspective, Epidemic! allows us to understand one of the most critical issues of the coming millennium.
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Universal Health Care
What the United States Can Learn from the Canadian Experience$14.95Polls show Americans increasingly unhappy with our health care system. Yet for nearly thirty years, our next-door neighbor has had a universal, public health insurance system that its citizens hail as their favorite social program. So why can’t it happen here? Universal Health Care explains how it can.
Clear and convincing, Universal Health Care shows that health care can be funded from the public purse without eliminating choice and without bankrupting government, and it proves that a public, single-payer system can deliver high quality care at much less cost to many more people than one based on market forces.
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