A focused, well-researched depiction of the dental industry’s social and cultural relevance and its dire need for reform.
An astute examination of the complex, insular business of oral health care.
Former Washington Post journalist Otto recognizes poor oral hygiene and maintenance as a major public health problem, and she adroitly probes the ramifications of this persistent “silent epidemic of oral disease.” While those in disadvantaged communities cite affordability, accessibility, and shame as factors in their lack of dental care, the opposite can be said for more privileged socio-economic groups, in which vanity and self-consciousness inspire an obsession with teeth bleaching, porcelain veneers, and spatial alignment. “Bad teeth depersonalize the sufferer,” writes the author. “They confer the stigma of economic and even moral failure.” Aside from economic variances, Otto charts the history of American dentistry, including the astronomical educational debt of dental school students and, consequently, why more progressive dental offices are often established within wealthier enclaves. The author meticulously examines the inexplicable fragmentation of oral health from established American health care systems, the increase in emergency room dental visits by uninsured patients, and how unregulated costs, a shortage of free clinics, and plans like Medicaid further isolate poorer populations from obtaining dental care. She also addresses the widely debated medical claim directly connecting oral health to overall health. Otto presents several case studies reflecting the state of the industry, including a young Miss USA pageant contestant’s pursuit of the “Hollywood smile” and the shocking deaths of two young men from untreated dental abscesses. Though the situation is certainly a grim national concern, Otto presents hope via radical initiatives to stave off the flow of dental demand. Still, she implores, prevention and upkeep are paramount, as “people are held personally accountable for the state of their teeth in ways that they are not held accountable for many other health conditions.”
A focused, well-researched depiction of the dental industry’s social and cultural relevance and its dire need for reform.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62097-144-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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