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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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