A vigorous argument for unified public health measures.
A pointed study of how divisiveness and conflict undermine the nation’s response to disease.
Law professor and legal historian Price offers an authoritative history of America’s flawed responses to epidemics. “Not only does the United States have the most fragmented public health system in the world,” she writes, “but most states retain antiquated public health laws that do not serve us well.” Due to poorly constructed laws and underfunded health agencies, the U.S. responds to pandemics “not as one nation, but as fifty-five smaller nations—the states, territories, and commonwealths that politically subdivide the country.” Responsibility for tuberculosis control, for example, “is divided among 2,684 state, local, and tribal health departments.” Price recounts waves of epidemics in the nation’s early years, when there was no treatment except to isolate the ill. With the discovery of a vaccine for smallpox, local, state, and federal authorities mandated vaccination, although not without controversy. Often, citizens looked for groups to blame, including immigrants, Asians, Mexicans, or even people from other states. In response to yellow fever, “shotgun quarantines” were enforced by militias or deputized volunteers. In 1900, an outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco led to the quarantine of the city’s entire Chinatown—a strategy struck down by a federal judge. The rollout of vaccines for Covid-19 echoes what occurred with the vaccine for polio in the 1950s. “Not only was there no patent on the vaccine but there was no plan in place to oversee or coordinate its distribution,” writes Price. “America’s first nationwide vaccination effort was chaotic and politically divisive, as demand for the vaccine outpaced supply.” The author effectively shows how every epidemic has generated tensions about which level of government has the authority to make public health decisions. She recommends a stronger federal role in responding to pandemics, including coordination of the nation’s primary health agencies and nationally funded coverage of the costs of testing and treatment.
A vigorous argument for unified public health measures.Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8070-4349-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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