A compelling contribution to the literature on the important issue of health care inequity.
How systemic oppression erodes the health of members of marginalized communities.
Geronimus, a professor of public health, coined the term weathering to describe the decline in health and life expectancy that results from repeated or sustained activation of physiological stress responses. In this insightful and well-argued book, the author contends that the physiological effects of living in marginalized communities, often caused by racial, ethnic, religious, and class discrimination, play a more significant role in the health of its members than genetics or lifestyle choices. Geronimus also looks at the concept of “age-washing,” which describes a way of thinking that ignores the effects of systemic problems on the health of marginalized individuals and attempts to place the cause elsewhere, leading to the proliferation of the "blame narrative." The author bases her findings on three decades of research, including her own, some of which has contradicted conventional thinking. Though she considered writing a book about weathering for nearly her entire career, she was “stopped cold” and called to action when she learned about shocking increases in mortality rates, “in particular preventable deaths of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and rural white mothers,” over the same time period. With health inequalities not only remaining entrenched, but continuing to rise in the past 30 years, the author seeks to “spark new narratives and new understandings that will pave the way to new paths toward achieving health equity.” In that, she succeeds, and the text benefits from the author’s inclusion of stories of individuals who have experienced firsthand the effects of weathering, including those of her own family as descendants of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. In the hard-driving second part of the book, Geronimus provides suggestions to create a new path forward, creating action items for readers truly interested in doing something about “racialized injustice and the weathering it causes.”
A compelling contribution to the literature on the important issue of health care inequity.Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780316257978
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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