Health
Showing all 11 results
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Eating Behind Bars
Ending the Hidden Punishment of Food in Prison$20.99A vivid exploration of an unseen food crisis affecting millions of Americans
Eating Behind Bars exposes the grim realities of food in U.S. prisons, where hunger, malnourishment, and food waste coexist with dehumanizing mealtime conditions. This disturbing portrait of eating behind bars came to light in 2020 when the nonprofit Impact Justice released the first-ever national examination of food in prison, catapulting the issue from the margins of prison litigation to the center of national conversations about mass incarceration and food justice. The result is this landmark book, revealing a crisis of nutrition affecting the health of incarcerated Americans.
Grounded in riveting testimonials from formerly incarcerated people and accompanied by compelling photographs and illustrations, Eating Behind Bars documents the scarcity of fresh food in prison and high rates of diet-related disease and illness, often as the result of the race to spend as little as possible. The authors propose innovative solutions including “farm to tray” programs, prison-based farms, and chef-led initiatives to provide healthy, appealing food as a basic human right, challenging the broader system of mass incarceration.
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Deadly Quiet City
True Stories from Wuhan$27.99Named one of the Best Books of the Year by The Economist and Kirkus Reviews
From one of China’s most celebrated—and silenced—literary authors, riveting portraits of eight Wuhan residents at the dawn of the pandemic
When a strange new virus appeared in the largest city in central China late in 2019, the 11 million people living there were oblivious to what was about to hit them. But rumors of a new disease soon began to spread, mostly from doctors. In no time, lines of sick people were forming at the hospitals. At first the authorities downplayed medical concerns. Then they locked down the entire city and confined people to their homes.
From Beijing, Murong Xuecun—one of China’s most popular writers, silenced by the regime in 2013 for his outspoken books and New York Times articles—followed the state media fearing the worst. Then, on April 6, 2020, he made his way quietly to Wuhan, determined to look behind the heroic images of sacrifice and victory propagated by the regime to expose the fear, confusion, and suffering of the real people living through the world’s first and harshest COVID-19 lockdown.
In the tradition of Dan Baum’s bestselling Nine Lives, Deadly Quiet City focuses on the remarkable stories of eight people in Wuhan. They include a doctor at the frontline, a small businessman separated from his family, a volunteer who threw himself into assisting the sick and dying, and a party loyalist who found a reason for everything. Although the Chinese Communist Party has devoted enormous efforts to rewriting the history of the pandemic’s outbreak in Wuhan, through these poignant and beautifully written firsthand accounts Murong tells us what really happened in Wuhan, giving us a book unlike any other on the earliest days of the pandemic.
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Administrations of Lunacy
Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum$37.00 – $40.00A scathing and original look at the racist origins of psychiatry, through the story of the largest mental institution in the world
Today, 90 percent of psychiatric beds are located in jails and prisons across the United States, institutions that confine disproportionate numbers of African Americans. After more than a decade of research, the celebrated scholar and activist Mab Segrest locates the deep historical roots of this startling fact, turning her sights on a long-forgotten cauldron of racial ideology: the state mental asylum system in which psychiatry was born and whose influences extend into our troubled present.
In December 1841, the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum was founded. A hundred years later, it had become the largest insane asylum in the world with over ten thousand patients. Administrations of Lunacy tells the story of this iconic and infamous southern institution, a history that was all but erased from popular memory and within the psychiatric profession.
Through riveting accounts of historical characters, Segrest reveals how modern psychiatric practice was forged in the traumas of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. Deftly connecting this history to the modern era, Segrest then shows how a single asylum helped set the stage for the eugenics theories of the twentieth century and the persistent racial ideologies of our own times. She also traces the connections to today’s dissident psychiatric practices that offer sanity and create justice.
A landmark of scholarship, Administrations of Lunacy restores a vital thread between past and present, revealing the tangled racial roots of psychiatry in America.
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American Epidemic
Reporting from the Front Lines of the Opioid Crisis$17.99A first-of-its kind collection of the most vivid reporting about the most lethal addiction crisis ever
Just a few years ago, the opioid crisis could be referred to as a “silent epidemic,” but it is no longer possible to argue that the scourge of opiate addiction being overlooked. This is in large part thanks to the extraordinary writings featured in this volume, which includes some of the most impactful reporting in the United States in recent years addressing the opiate addiction crisis. American Epidemic collects, for the first time, the key works of reportage and analysis that provide the best picture available of the origins, consequences, and human calamity associated with the epidemic.
Spirited, informed, and eloquently written, American Epidemic will serve as an essential introduction for anyone seeking insight into the deadliest drug crisis in American history.
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Eating Tomorrow
Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food$26.99“A powerful polemic against agricultural technology.”
—NatureA major new book that shows the world already has the tools to feed itself, without expanding industrial agriculture or adopting genetically modified seeds, from the Small Planet Institute expert
Few challenges are more daunting than feeding a global population projected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050—at a time when climate change is making it increasingly difficult to successfully grow crops. In response, corporate and philanthropic leaders have called for major investments in industrial agriculture, including genetically modified seed technologies. Reporting from Africa, Mexico, India, and the United States, Timothy A. Wise’s Eating Tomorrow discovers how in country after country agribusiness and its well-heeled philanthropic promoters have hijacked food policies to feed corporate interests.
Most of the world, Wise reveals, is fed by hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers, people with few resources and simple tools but a keen understanding of what and how to grow food. These same farmers—who already grow more than 70 percent of the food eaten in developing countries—can show the way forward as the world warms and population increases. Wise takes readers to remote villages to see how farmers are rebuilding soils with ecologically sound practices and nourishing a diversity of native crops without chemicals or imported seeds. They are growing more and healthier food; in the process, they are not just victims in the climate drama but protagonists who have much to teach us all.
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A New Leaf
The End of Cannabis Prohibition$17.95 – $17.99Two award-winning journalists offer a “cogent, well-sourced and ambitious analysis of the slow decline of cannabis prohibition in the United States” (Kirkus Reviews).
In November 2012, voters in Colorado and Washington passed landmark measures to legalize the production and sale of cannabis for social use—a first in the United States and the world. Once vilified as a “gateway drug,” cannabis is now legal for medical use in eighteen states and Washington, DC. Yet the federal government refuses to acknowledge these broader societal shifts. 49.5 percent of all drug-related arrests involve the sale, manufacture, or possession of cannabis.
In the first book to explore the new landscape of cannabis in the United States, investigative journalists Alyson Martin and Nushin Rashidian demonstrate how recent cultural and legal developments tie into cannabis’s complex history and thorny politics. Reporting from nearly every state with a medical cannabis law, Martin and Rashidian interview patients, growers, doctors, entrepreneurs, politicians, activists, and regulators.
A New Leaf moves from the federal cannabis farm at the University of Mississippi to the headquarters of the ACLU to Oregon’s World Famous Cannabis Café. The result is a lucid account of how cannabis legalization is changing the lives of millions of Americans and easing the burden of the “war on drugs” both domestically and internationally.
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Betting on Famine
Why the World Still Goes Hungry$26.95 – $26.99“The seminal book on global poverty and hunger . . . How rapacious speculators and complicit bureaucrats are starving a billion people” (Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch and author of Foodopoly).
Few people know that world hunger was very nearly eradicated in our lifetimes. In the past five years, however, widespread starvation has suddenly reappeared, and chronic hunger is a major issue on every continent.
In an extensive investigation of this disturbing shift, Jean Ziegler—one of the world’s leading food experts—lays out in clear and accessible terms the complex global causes of the new hunger crisis. Ziegler’s wide-ranging and fascinating examination focuses on how the new sustainable revolution in energy production has diverted millions of acres of corn, soy, wheat, and other grain crops from food to fuel. The results, he shows, have been sudden and startling, with declining food reserves sending prices to record highs and a new global commodities market in ethanol and other biofuels gobbling up arable lands in nearly every continent on earth.
Like Raj Patel’s pioneering Stuffed and Starved, Betting on Famine will enlighten the millions of Americans concerned about the politics of food at home—and about the forces that prevent us from feeding the world’s children.
“In this devastating book, [Ziegler] describes the horrors of food insecurity, the callousness of ‘crusaders of neoliberalism’ who control food and land access, and the individuals and grassroots organizations fighting for subsistence farmers and the right to food.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Passionate, well-researched, objective, and illuminating . . . When we close this book, indignant, we know that those who die of hunger are victims of money and power.” —L’Express
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10 Excellent Reasons for National Health Care
$13.95The United States spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care, yet our system performs poorly in comparison and still leaves 46 million without health coverage and millions more inadequately covered.
Imagine a health care program that is publicly funded and covers all basic medical services from doctor visits, hospitalization, and long-term care to prescription drugs, dental care, and mental health. 10 Excellent Reasons for National Health Care offers an array of powerful arguments for why and how this could become a reality. With fact-filled chapters written by leading physicians, health care professionals, policy makers, business-people, labor organizers, and others, this book shows how a national health care system is simpler, more inclusive, saves money, is good for business, will reduce health care disparities, and is a fundamental human right.
In time for the 2008 elections and following on the heels of Michael Moore’s Sicko, 10 Excellent Reasons for National Health Care offers powerful ammunition in favor of a fundamental change to American health care—and shows how we really can develop a comprehensive national health program for the United States. -
Diet for a Dead Planet
Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis$17.95 – $24.95If we are what we eat, then, as Christopher D. Cook contends in this powerful look at the food industry, we are not in good shape. The facts speak for themselves: more than 75 million Americans suffered from food poisoning last year, and 5,000 of them died; 67 percent of American males are overweight, obesity is the second leading cause of preventable death in the United States and supersizing is just the tip of the iceberg: the way we make and eat food today is putting our environment and the very future of food at risk.
Diet for a Dead Planet takes us beyond Fast Food Nation to show how our entire food system is in crisis. Corporate control of farms and supermarkets, unsustainable drives to increase agribusiness productivity and profits, misplaced subsidies for exports, and anemic regulation have all combined to produce a grim harvest. Food, our most basic necessity, has become a force behind a staggering array of social, economic, and environmental epidemics.
Yet there is another way. Cook argues cogently for a whole new way of looking at what we eat—one that places healthy, sustainably produced food at the top of the menu for change. In the words of Jim Hightower, “If you eat, read this important book!”
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A Life in Medicine
A Literary Anthology$19.99 – $27.95“Excellent” poetry and prose about physicians and their patients, by Raymond Carver, Kay Redfield Jamison, Rachel Naomi Remen, and more (Library Journal).
A Life in Medicine collects stories, poems, and essays by and for those in the healing profession, who are struggling to keep up with the science while staying true to the humanitarian goals at the heart of their work. Organized around the central themes of altruism, knowledge, skill, and duty, the book includes contributions from well-known authors, doctors, nurses, practitioners, and patients. Provocative and moving pieces address what it means to care for a life in a century of unprecedented scientific advances, examining issues of hope and healing from both ends of the stethoscope.
“An anthology of lasting appeal to those interested in medicine, well-written literature, and a sympathetic understanding of human life.” —Booklist -
Dear Bruno
$12.00In 1979, Alice Trillin, who three years earlier had been diagnosed with a malignant lung tumor, received a call from good friend Annie Navasky telling her that Annie’s twelve-year-old son, Bruno, also had cancer. Alice’s response was a letter to Bruno in which she tried to show that it was possible to talk about cancer in a tone that was frank, honest, and funny. Children and adults struggling with the ‘why me?’ of cancer will find in this book a realistic, funny, and somehow, reassuring exploration of the fight for survival. Illustrated with cartoons by New Yorker artist Edward Koren.
Showing all 11 results
