Insightful, as always, but hardly encouraging.
This story of the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak by an expert lacks the media hysteria common at the time but manages to be even more disturbing.
Farmer, the chair of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard and founding director of Partners in Health, has spent his life delivering medical care to undeveloped nations—and writing engagingly about his experiences. In his latest, the author describes the epidemic that likely killed many more people than officially reported. Readers will be surprised to learn that, despite lurid accounts such as Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone, Ebola is not a death sentence. Treatment involves routine hospital care, especially the replacement of lost fluids intravenously. Deaths were rare in victims evacuated to Europe or America but more than 50% in Africa. Farmer reserves special ire for international organizations proclaiming that simply treating individuals would never defeat the epidemic. Aggressive control measures, including quarantine, contact tracing, and sanitation upgrades, were required. It’s a no-brainer, Farmer points out, that sick people want care, and he continues his careerlong, morally sound argument that access to proper health care should be a universal right. Having recounted the epidemic in the first third of the book, the author steps back to describe how the region’s history made disaster inevitable—and what the future may hold. Of the nations involved, Sierra Leone and Guinea were colonies until after World War II. Trade has always supported the economies, at first via the slave trade and then extraction—mostly lumber and mining—which benefits wealthy locals and foreign industries. Often kleptocratic governments have built little health infrastructure, and what they did create was often destroyed by vicious civil wars. A final chapter reveals that Farmer and colleagues are now dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, which many developed nations are handling more or less efficiently. Though not yet severely affected, many countries in Africa are unprepared.
Insightful, as always, but hardly encouraging.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-23432-4
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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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