Anonymous
Posted January 1, 2007
As a twentysomething trying to figure out my career path, I found Farmer's overall message and his obvious passion very inspirational. Though the book deals with grim realities, Farmer offers refreshing and proactive ways to start to grapple with complex human rights issues. Though written from a physician-anthrolopologist's perspective and intended for health professionals/students, it's accessible for layreaders as well. The only weakness is the slight redundancy, since some of the chapters seem to have been adapated from Farmer's previous work and thus overlap considerably. Overall, highly recommended!
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Posted March 21, 2003
Once again Dr. Paul Farmer puts his finger on the pulse of the collective poor and marginalized and renders a nuanced analysis of the inequities in health care in the populations that he serves, namely, Cange, Haiti, Peru, Mexico and Russia.
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Posted August 13, 2012
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Anonymous
Posted October 14, 2008
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More About This Textbook
Overview
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.
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Meet the Author
Paul Farmer is Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School and Founding Director of Partners In Health. Among his books are Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (California, 1999), The Uses of Haiti (1994), and AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame (California, 1992). Farmer is the winner of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award and the Margaret Mead Award for his contributions to public anthropology. He recently held the Blaise Pascal International Chair at the College de France. Amartya Sen, whose work challenges conventional market-driven economic paradigms, is the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics. He teaches at Trinity College, Cambridge University.
Read an Excerpt
"Paul Farmer is a great doctor with massive experience working against the hardest of diseases in the most adverse circumstances, and, at the same time, he is a proficient and insightful anthropologist. Farmer's knowledge of maladies such as AIDS and drug-resistant tuberculosis, which he fights on behalf of his indigent patients, is hard to match. But what is particularly relevant in appreciating the contribution of this powerful book is that Farmer is a visionary analyst who looks beyond the details of fragmentary explanations to seek an integrated understanding of a complex reality."--Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate, Economics
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