A valiant effort to link medicine and injustice: thought-provoking, knowledgeable, and ripe for debate and further study.
A passionate exploration of world poverty, racism, injustice, and colonialism that draws a parallel to inflammation.
Marya is a physician, professor of internal medicine, and activist, and Patel is a professor of public affairs and nutrition and the author of the 2010 bestseller The Value of Nothing. In this collaboration, the authors explain that when tissues are damaged or threatened, our immune system sends cells and molecular messengers that attack invaders, repair damage, and restore the body to health. Sometimes, “the response doesn’t switch off, and the result is a chronic inflammatory state. When that happens, the body’s healing mechanism is transformed into a smoldering fire that creates ongoing harm.” We suffer more chronic inflammation as we get older, and external factors (environmental toxins, stress, malnutrition) are the leading causes. The authors are far from the first to stress chronic inflammation’s role in cancer, heart disease, diabetes, colitis, mental illness, dementia, and even aging, although they give it perhaps more credit than it deserves. They are rigorous scientists, so readers will learn a great deal as they describe human biological systems, focusing on the damage inflicted by inflammation but casting a wide thematic net. The chapter on the reproductive system eschews parallels with inflammation in favor of linking colonialism to the oppression of women. The obligatory how-to-fix-it conclusion will leave some readers scratching their heads. Having described a world of Orwellian awfulness, the authors propose not mass action but “deep medicine.” They write that individuals can be healthy “only when the entire community is also healthy…this is achievable only through social, economic, political, ecological, and cosmological spheres working in an integrated fashion for the benefit of all.” This may remind older readers of the ideals of universal harmony and spiritual growth that marked the 1960s, but the authors are persuasive in most of their arguments about the deleterious physical and mental effects of capitalism and colonialism.
A valiant effort to link medicine and injustice: thought-provoking, knowledgeable, and ripe for debate and further study.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-60251-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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