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
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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