Unsettling but insightful social history.
A history of diabetes over the past 150 years, less as a disease than a mark of racial stereotyping.
Vanderbilt professor Tuchman, a specialist in the history of medicine in the U.S. and Europe, begins in the late 19th century, when scientists had learned enough about germs, hygiene, nutrition, and physiology to give doctors confidence that they understood disease. Using diabetes as her example, the author delivers a well-researched, lucidly written, and often unnerving account of how doctors have explained it down to the present day, often ignoring the science in favor of the prejudices and anxieties of their time. Readers may be surprised to learn that until well into the 20th century, doctors considered diabetes a Jewish disease, supposedly caused by what some physicians called “Jewish nervousness.” During this same period, doctors recorded so few cases of diabetes in Black patients that many regarded them as immune, following the racist belief circulating at the time that “immunity signified a race’s primitive nature.” In a theme she repeats throughout, Tuchman points out that statistics during this period refuted both claims, but few paid attention. As the 20th century progressed, these theories faded, replaced by the idea that diabetes was the result of overindulgence. Most victims were obese, and women fell victim more often than men. Tuchman stresses that racial stereotyping did not disappear but merely switched gears. Flawed notions of poverty, obesity, and race all contributed to prejudice and discrimination, though the word “race” was rarely mentioned. Even today, writes Tuchman, there is not enough “recognition that racism and poverty are themselves fundamental causes for ill health, potentially exacerbating diabetes by raising stress and glucose levels, and certainly placing an additional burden on individuals who may already be struggling to make ends meet.” Labeling patients as “responsible for their disease,” she writes, “masks the structural inequalities that produce poor health.”
Unsettling but insightful social history.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-22899-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
