Book Description
Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of life--and death--in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience working in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world's poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. With passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other.
Farmer shows that the same social forces that give rise to epidemic diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis also sculpt risk for human rights violations. He illustrates the ways that racism and gender inequality in the United States are embodied as disease and death. Yet this book is far from a hopeless inventory of abuse. Farmer's disturbing examples are linked to a guarded optimism that new medical and social technologies will develop in tandem with a more informed sense of social justice. Otherwise, he concludes, we will be guilty of managing social inequality rather than addressing structural violence. Farmer's urgent plea to think about human rights in the context of global public health and to consider critical issues of quality and access for the world's poor should be of fundamental concern to a world characterized by the bizarre proximity of surfeit and suffering.
Customer Reviews:
Health and survival as human rights.......2007-05-30
Paul Farmer, perhaps the most famous 'Third World doctor' living today, has written an eloquent and moving plea for a reconsideration of modern approaches toward healthcare in the developing nations in this book, "Pathologies of Power". Based on his personal experiences of care in Haiti, but also his professional visits to Russia, Africa, Central America, Mexico, Cuba and many other places besides, Paul Farmer demonstrates that the problematics of healthcare and those of poverty and inequality are insolubly linked in these nations. Whoever says "heal the sick" must also say "end poverty", for the one is not possible without the other; and whoever says "prevent disease" must also say "destroy socio-economic inequality", for the one is not possible without the other. That is the message of this book.
A large part of the work consists of reflections by Farmer on his experiences in Haiti and elsewhere and on the way in which the current worldwide economic structures engender a genuine and systematic violence against the rights of the poor. Strongly inspired by liberation theology (though not necessarily religious), Farmer eloquently and effectively contrasts the heavy importance attached to individual political and legal rights with the way in which the violations of rights done by structural inequalities and injustices is wholly ignored in the same circles that would complain about the former. Rights issues are the domain of jurists, development issues the domain of (liberal) economists; but the way in which the poor and weak are constantly crushed by the systematic repression that is poverty and inequality, at least as real and at least as much a violation as any torture, that seems to be the domain of nobody at all. As Paul Farmer clearly shows, even in the lately so blossoming domain of medical and bioethics the issue of socio-economic structures is completely swept under the carpet. As he says, this really is the "elephant in the room".
The same also goes for the oft-invoked importance of efficiency. Callous and counterproductive Western, often American, inspired healthcare policies in the developing nations (among which we must now sadly share Russia as well) generally fail at providing effective treatment against simple preventable disease such as TBC, because those medications that would actually help are considered "not cost-effective". This is in fact just a polite way of saying "we don't care about these people", but then phrased in a manner that will lead to less of an uproar in the newspapers. Farmer however is not fooled so easily, and sees this for what it is - a structural repression of the developing nations by the developed ones, in the name of "efficiency", i.e. efficiency in achieving the aims of the Western states.
This book is a very powerful work, and a strong indictment of the prevailing attitude towards healthcare and development issues and the little attention paid to their interrelation. It also demonstrates convincingly how the current worldwide economic system is bad for everybody's health. And what could be a more important thing than that?
Pathologies of Power.......2007-05-12
Read this book. Paul Farmer is one of the few who can enlighten us to a more profound understanding of the mechanisms that underlie disease in so many of its forms. He sees farther than most of us and comes to his conclusions with a gigantic intellect and hard hard hands-on work with the poor and ill for over 2 decades in Haiti and elsewhere. He is our Albert Schweitzer. His concept of "structural violence", that set of social and economic intrastructure deficits that set aside "rich" from "poor" and lays open the environment for not only the contagious diseases like TB and HIV, but also allows for the malnourishment and the reduced choices in nutrition, allows for the maintenance of the dearth of available health care resources, sanitation and educational systems, the conflation of which prevents protection against the illnesses of poverty, puts the reader into the realm of being forced to see a hidden and dirty truth. His prose is mutedly angry. His emotions are unmistakably righteous. His undressing of some of the "liberal" NGO mentality is eye opening. He is the real deal. Read his elegant words and get a glimpse at reality. We are sadly blinded to it by some of the "pathologies" of the powers that be. I have been a physician for almost 30 years. I've given this book to my sons who are young physicians. The thoroughness of his presentation of the causes of the societal ills that allow for the illnesses, and the bibiography that supports his theses are encylopedic in scope. Again, he is the real deal.
passion for the poor.......2007-01-18
Paul Farmer is a Harvard MD and PhD (anthropology), clinician, tuberculosis specialist, author of numerous books and scholarly articles, recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, and Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School--when he is not living in a hut in his beloved Haiti where he founded Partners in Health, or traveling a quarter million miles a year to lecture, visit prisons, or meet with George Soros or the Gates Foundation. Most important of all, Farmer is an unapologetic, outspoken, and radical advocate for the poorest of the poor. Adequate health care, he insists, is a basic human right for every human being, and our world is failing miserably in this regard. His fascinating life story is told by Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder in the book Mountains Beyond Mountains (2003).
According to a World Bank study from 1993, today in Sub-Saharan Africa "the median age at death is less than five years," (p. xi; no typographical error). Such deplorable disparities between rich and poor, Farmer writes, are not random occurrences, they are not accidental, inescapable or necessary. Rather, they result from pathologies of power, human agency, and structural violence. Quoting the liberation theologian Jon Sobrino, "The poor of the world are not the causal products of human history. No, poverty results from the actions of other human beings" (p. 143). Which is to say that the brutal asymmetry that consigns over half the world to wretchedness is not irremediable. Resignation, in fact, is the most inexcusable choice we could make. However daunting and complex, we can ameliorate these unacceptable conditions if we make other choices: "This book is a physician-anthropologist's effort to reveal the ways in which the most basic right--the right to survive--is trampled in an age of great affluence, and it argues that the matter should be considered the most pressing one of our times" (p. 6).
Farmer spends considerable time charting anecdotal evidence from his two decades of clinical practice serving the poorest of the poor. These detailed case studies from Haiti, Chiapas, Peru, Russia and Cuba are not mere examples but instead emblematic of the problem. Further, following liberation theologians who have deeply influenced him, Farmer strongly advocates listening carefully to the voices of the poor themselves, in their own words, and not only to health "experts" in Geneva, New York and Paris. "I believe," writes Farmer, that 'the poor and impoverished of the world, in virtue of their very reality, constitute the most radical question of the truth of this world, as well as the most correct response to this question'" (p. 202).
Some will dismiss rhetoric like that as from a wild-eyed idealist, or an angry extremist, but Farmer would respond that what is extreme and harsh are the conditions of way too many human beings in the world, which ought to evoke anger, and not his passionate advocacy for them (p. 254). Rather than merely "manage" these horrible social inequalities, Farmer challenges each one of us to make a difference by what he calls "pragmatic solidarity" with the poor.
Farmer lucid and compelling as ever.......2007-01-04
For anyone who is inspired by the remarkable work Paul Farmer has engaged in over the years, this book offers a sound explanation of his guiding doctrine on human rights and healthcare for the poor.
Toward a "real" medical ethics.......2006-11-11
It's a big world, but we Americans seem to reside in a small one, at least those of us fortunate enough to be insured and able to afford the health care we need. Many fellow US citizens cannot afford to be sick or ill at all, yet their needs may be tended only once they are so ill that emergency room care is required, but maybe not even then. Then there are the desperately poor of other nations and whole regions of the world that have virtually no care at all. This book is about those folks and medicine as it is currently practiced and dispensed here and abroad. Author Doctor Paul Farmer shows that modern medical practice violates the very ethos that spawned the impulse to heal in the first place.
This book has a lot of structural problems that, while off-putting, are easily ignored by the enormous contribution Farmer makes to our understanding of a set of topics that most of us have not thought about at all. This is an important and inspired book, one that is clear and easy to read, although marred by redundancy that a good editor might have helped eliminate. The thesis topic is that the desperately poor deserve more attention, not less as they now are accorded, because they are more vulnerable by definition. Farmer successfully questions the allocation of our resources toward corporate profits rather than treating the poor of the world.
Farmer's case studies based on his experience of working in Boston, Hattie, and the Russian Republic amply illustrate that our health care priorities are backward and unjust at best, pernicious and self defeating at worst. Every medical ethics course in the US ought to require this along with, or in place of, their existing textbooks that grind over the hoary issues of abortion and euthanasia, and a lot of other topics that are luxuries of a rich society that all but ignores those in greatest need.
Book Description
In this provocative and compelling examination of the deep politics of war, Carolyn Nordstrom takes us from the immediacy of war-zone survival, through the offices of power brokers, to vast extra-legal networks that fuel war and international profiteering. She captures the human face of the front lines, revealing both the visible and the hidden realities of war in the twenty-first century. Shadows of War is grounded in ethnographic research carried out at the epicenters of political violence on several continents. Its pages are populated not only with the perpetrators and victims of war but also with the scoundrels, silent heroes, and average families who live their lives in the midst of explosive violence. War reconfigures our most basic notions of humanity, Nordstrom demonstrates. This book, of crucial importance at the present moment, shows that war is enmeshed in struggles over the very foundations of the sovereign state, the crafting of economic empires both legal and illegal, and innovative searches for peace.
Nordstrom describes the multi-trillion-dollar international financial networks that support warfare. She traces the entangled routes by which illegal drugs, precious gems, weapons, basic food supplies, and pharmaceuticals are moved by an international cast of businesspeople, profiteers, and black-market operators. Shadows of War demonstrates how the experiences of both the architects of war and of ordinary people are deleted from media accounts and replaced with stories about soldiers, weapons, and territory. For the first time, this book retrieves from the shadows the faces of those whose stories seldom reach the light of international recognition.
Customer Reviews:
Another great work from Nordstrom.......2006-08-19
Dr. Nordstrom consistently goes where most of us never will, both physically and intellectually. Another great work.
A tremendously rich work, a revelation........2004-11-24
This book reveals aspects of war normally "in the shadows"--the vast profits to be made from conflicts in resource-rich regions; the informal systems through which the resources move north to the "peaceful" developed countries and the weapons, medicines, technology of the north move south to fuel the wars and also sometimes to help heal them. This is wonderful anthropology, rich in quotes and stories from the winners and losers in war--from UN officials, profiteers, development bankers to resourceful homeless children of the streets. Shadows of War will change the way you see the world. It has tremendous implicatons for the future of all of us in the 21st century, who live amongst the realities of extra-state power (like bin Laden's) that we are hardly beginning to understand.
Good Storyteller, Poor Academic.......2004-09-18
Attempting to do research in the field of war and developing, I have mixed feelings about the utility of this book. As a collection of first-hand stories about conflict in Mozambique, the book does an admirable job, and I suspect that anyone who treats it as a adventure travel book with some political overtones will enjoy it. Treat it like early Robert Kaplan, and it will be worth your while.
However, if you're looking for some substantial insight into the living conditions of a ravaged permament conflict-ridden region of the world, I find it lacks academic rigour. Prof Nordstrom begins to chart economic relationships that both fuel and rape the region, yet does so half-heartedly. She discusses the societal strain that the conflict has caused, yet again does so as a storyteller rather than an academic. Although there were a few interesting anecdotes, I felt like I was reading "Chicken Soup for the Soul".
The bottom line is, if you're looking for academic insight, look elsewhere. As a description of life in Mozambique, the book is fine.
I won't even go into the fact that little is given in the way of solution at the end of the book. Regardless what you feel your role is as an academic, I would have thought rational due diligence would have at least inspired you to write guidance on potential solutions. Otherwise, why read the book?
As a postscript, if you've spent any time yourself in developing nations and are looking for this to supplement your experience, you'll find nothing new here.
Lessons and realities of life in shadows of armed conflict.......2004-07-23
This is a wonderful book to understand what is ?normality? outside the vision of the Media but the essence of our century for much of the world. Simplistic phrases like ?failed state? don?t cut it and their use by diplomats, policy makers, or pundits merely proves their ignorance and/or superficiality. It is usually also evidence that they don?t really care a bit so long as raw materials from these areas make it to world markets.
Many people and a very significant part of the world economy is in this ?unofficial? and shadowlike area. Many depend upon it without even knowing that it exists. (Violent ?terrorism? is our present obsession but not the only storyline to understand much of the world.)
The author is an Anthropologist who has spent considerable time in various no-man?s lands especially in Southern Africa and explains some of the illicit ?order? that keeps things going in war, borderlands, and general chaos. There are brief comparative references to Latin America as well. The analysis and description is the best I have ever seen in print (much deeper than Kaplan?s Coming Anarchy which might be the nearest comparison although very different in style and with little real analysis).
Perhaps a fifth of the book is telling anecdotes that humanize the book and are relevant but which could be skipped if a reader had little time (these are clearly identified in small print and spacing.) Other readers will find these the most approachable part of the book.
Crime, violence, child soldiers, smuggling, viciousness are here. But so are some means of continuing trade and human relations, some sparks of peace and order and even some hopeful examples of places gradually finding their path back to more civil society. From children living in ?clean? storm drains as family, to unrecognized states formed in areas of noted violence, to gradual reconciliation after war and violence ? there are lessons to be learned and some small ray of hope.
Book Description
Gostin's timely book offers the first systematic definition and theory of public health law. Basing his definition on a broad notion of the government's inherent responsibility to advance the population's health and well-being, he develops a rich understanding of the government's fundamental powers and duties. By analyzing constitutional powers and limits, as well as statutory, administrative, and tort law, Public Health Law vividly shows how law can become a potent tool for the realization of a healthier and safer population.
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A Place in the Sun: The Evolution of the Real Goods Solar Living Center (Real Goods Solar Living Book.)
John Schaeffer
Manufacturer: Chelsea Green Publishing Company
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ASIN: 1890132012 |
Amazon.com
Ninety miles north of San Francisco, the Real Goods Trading Company constructed a cutting-edge solar living center using building materials, landscaping techniques, and futuristic renewable energy technologies. The center is a working demonstration site for renewable energy and earth-friendly building and landscaping concepts; A Place in the Sun is the exciting and fascinating story of how the people and ideas came together to bring the center from conception to a functioning, tangible reality. The result is an eclectic, visionary complex of buildings and landscaping that functions as a center for education, a retail operation, and an experimental demonstration framework for new technologies. The story of how it came to be is both hopeful and inspiring.
Book Description
Carolyn Nordstrom explores the pathways of global crime in this stunning work of anthropology that has the power to change the way we think about the world. To write this book, she spent three years traveling to hot spots in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the United States investigating the dynamics of illegal trade around the world--from blood diamonds and arms to pharmaceuticals, exotica, and staples like food and oil. Global Outlaws peels away the layers of a vast economy that extends from a war orphan in Angola selling Marlboros on the street to powerful transnational networks reaching across continents and oceans. Nordstrom's extraordinary fieldwork includes interviews with scores of informants, including the smugglers, victims, power elite, and profiteers who populate these economic war zones. Her compelling investigation, showing that the sum total of extra-legal activities represents a significant part of the world's economy, provides a new framework for understanding twenty-first-century economics and economic power. Global Outlaws powerfully reveals the illusions and realities of security in all areas of transport and trade and illuminates many of the difficult ethical problems these extra-legal activities pose.
Customer Reviews:
Good social science, good stories.......2007-10-11
An intriguing look at the culture and economy of smuggling and other illegal commerce, Global Outlaws opens many windows to provide a wide range of perspectives on the illegal economy, from the selling of a single smuggled cigarette in an African town to the movement of shipping containers (and their contents, legal and illegal) through a number of major American and European ports. Carolyn Nordstrom provides a rich view of the interdependencies of legal and illegal commerce, both the mundane (cigarettes, washing machines) and the exotic (endangered species of fish for high-end restaurants world-wide). She gives a sense of the range of people and networks involved in these activities, along with the benefits (how else could people get drugs to remote battlefields?) and the threats (could there be a bomb in that container of Barbie dolls?) of smuggling.
Much of the book represents deep field work at its best. Her presentation of trans-national shipping and port security contains good information that is not integrated so well as other parts of the book.
Change your thinking.......2007-10-01
If you want to change your thinking about how the world works and adjust it to how the world really works, then read this. If you want to believe that everything is on the up and up, then don't read this. The work covers everything from cigarettes to port security to portable wealth to banking. While most of us recognize that we live in a global world, we often forget that this global world has trade happening in the back room of the cafe with the help of the banks. This is a very honest look at many forms of illegal trade and finance from a very human perspective.
Crucial Reading For Those Interested in International Affairs.......2007-08-21
There's little doubt in my mind that transnational crime networks are vastly understudied relative to their impact on global health, security, and economics. Anthropologist Nordstrom clearly agrees, and lays out the fruits of three years of field work in this loosely arranged triptych of illegal (or as she would put it, "il/legal") trade. Broken into twenty brief (6-10 page) chapters, the book starts with the micro of a lone war orphan hawking cigarettes in Angola and slowly zooms out to the macro of international trade and finance. Each chapter opens with a photo, which helps to ground the discussion in the lives of people, rather than policy. The framework is an ambitious one, attempting to tie together a very broad range of material, and it doesn't always work. For example ports are the focus of three unconnected chapters rather than one sustained narrative.
Others have written about much of the same material before, especially the drug trade, the arms trade, and overhyped blood diamond trade. However, these accounts are generally written from a journalism or policy perspective -- none that I'm aware of have grounded their material in such deep fieldwork, nor written about it with such a good ear for the pithy quote or telling anecdote. One of the central themes of the book is that while drugs, arms, and diamonds get all the press, her fieldwork reveals that trafficking in more mundane goods, such as food, is ultimately a much larger part of the informal economy in much of the world. Particularly chilling is her expose of the international shipping industry and just how laughable the customs and security controls on it are. (The same problems are also well documented in William Langswiesche's Atlantic Monthly essays collected in the book The Outlaw Sea).
Unfortunately, the positive aspects Nordstrom's writing are sometimes weakened by the kinds of arcane theoretical digressions and awkward terminology that often pop up in works by academics. The writing is alo marred by a certain shrill tone when it comes to the workings of large multinational corporations and a somewhat snide approach to the operations of international aid and relief agencies. While I don't generally disagree with her analysis, I find the strident and bitter tone somewhat diverting from the truths she lays out. Criticisms of structure and writing aside, this is a valuable, and quick-reading work that anyone with an interest in world affairs should check out. Nordstrom has done a stellar job in illustrating the pervasiveness and flexibility of informal trade networks, and how they can be manipulated around the world to move just about anything, anywhere.
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- An Great Piece of History
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Dynamos and Virgins
David Roe
Manufacturer: Random House
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0394528980
Release Date: 1984-10-12 |
Customer Reviews:
An Great Piece of History.......2004-07-28
This book chronicals the history of how the Environmental Defense Fund struggled against the giant utilities in Calfornia to get them to consider conservation and more efficient electrical devices instead of just building power plants in the 1960's and 1970's. It was called the Least Cost Integrated Planning movement. Some in the utility industry say Roe is a bit biased, but the book is an exciting read, and should be required reading for anyone interested in the history of electrical utlities in this country.
Product Description
Friction between California's state and local governments has shaped fiscal policy and conflicts throughout the century. In The State-Local Fiscal Relationship in California: A Changing Balance of Power, J. Fred Silva and Elisa Barbour place such conflicts in a useful historical context. In particular, they explain why the divergent histories of city and county government have magnified the consequences of Proposition 13. After tracing shifts in city and county fiscal structures, they also examine current proposals to balance state and local fiscal power. The authors conclude that California public finance reflects neither the potential benefits of state-run system nor those of a decentralized system. Instead, it copes with fiscal stress through cost-shifting and competition between levels of government.
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Energy: A guide to organizations and information resources in the United States
Center for California Public Affairs
Manufacturer: Center for California Public Affairs
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
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ASIN: 0912102160 |
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- Quicken Willmaker Plus 2007 Edition: Estate Planning Essentials (Book with CD-ROM)
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- Sea of Thunder: Four Commanders and the Last Great Naval Campaign 1941-1945
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- The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm
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- The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena
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