A closely argued case for racial and class equity in health care, revealing a medical regime sorely in need of reform.
A damning account of how race and racism determine the quality and quantity of medical care in the U.S.
Patients in America enjoy what journalist and professor Villarosa characterizes as “the most advanced medical technology in the world.” Yet, she adds, by most measures, Black and other minority Americans are denied this technology. Though the author writes that there is nothing inferior or different about the Black body, for generations, a racist medical complex has persisted, supposing that, for example, Blacks possess “skin [that] is thicker than white skin” and feel less pain than do Whites. Less pain equals less anesthetic relief. So it is with many other aspects of health care. Daring to evoke critical race theory at a time when it arouses so many conservative legislators and school boards across the country, Villarosa examines the intersectionality of class, race, and gender. She notes, for instance, that George Floyd was suffering from Covid-19 at the time of his death, a fact that has bearing on the larger fact that there has long been significant “racial disparity in life expectancy” in the U.S. that was only heightened by the systemic lack of medical care in minority communities. Villarosa enlists numerous case studies to prove that point. On mental health, for instance, she observes that Black and other minority people are largely excluded de facto from treatment, a matter that again intersects with issues of “race and masculinity” that work to keep Black men from seeking help. Furthermore, whereas relatively few Whites died from AIDS after the development of the vaunted antiviral cocktail in the mid-1990s, it persisted long after in Black communities, which Villarosa, then writing for the New York Times, had to fight to report on, since “the epidemic was supposed to be over in America.”
A closely argued case for racial and class equity in health care, revealing a medical regime sorely in need of reform.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-385-54488-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 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.
