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 revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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