A provocative critique of the health care industry’s failings and a hopeful look at its future.
Saba, a physician, recounts a career attempting to reform and globalize the health care industry.
The author grew in Beirut, Lebanon, at a time when the country was ravaged by war, an experience from which he learned the essential fragility of all systems, however well-intentioned their design. Later, as a doctor on the front lines of the battle against the AIDS pandemic, that lesson would prove profoundly useful—Saba was always looking for new ways to deliver better health care to vulnerable populations, a challenging enterprise given the resistance of the health care industry at large to organizational progress, a predicament astutely and lucidly described. While a physician in France, he began conducting trials to improve AIDS treatment for the National Agency for AIDS Research and subsequently garnered widespread acclaim for establishing an antiretroviral drug access program—the UNAIDS Drug Access Initiative—to deliver affordable care to poorer nations. Ultimately, Saba would go on to co-found and operate his own company, Axios International, a firm devoted to devising innovative ways to improve access to health care, especially among disadvantaged populations. Still, in Saba’s view, the health care industry remains stubbornly wedded to an outdated model too reliant upon the hospital as a dispenser of care—the author argues that better health care now presupposes the strategic exploitation of new technologies that make global collaboration possible. “Ultimately, globalized healthcare is better healthcare. Imagine a world where you’d have access to not just the doctors in your backyard, but the best doctors in the world right at your fingertips, or highly specialized doctors who may not exist in your city through telemedicine.” The author focuses on his work battling AIDS, but his discussion is impressively wide-ranging and includes an expert reflection on the errors made by the global health care industry in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. This is an exceedingly thoughtful rumination from an industry insider who is deeply aware of all the imperfections of his profession while remaining admirably unwilling to accept that real change cannot be affected.
A provocative critique of the health care industry’s failings and a hopeful look at its future.Pub Date: March 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781544535289
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Houndstooth Press
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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