Reviewer: Kim A Logio, PhD (Saint Joseph's University)
Description: This is an edited collection of nearly 30 articles written by physicians, nurses, lawyers, policy analysts, social workers, philosophers, and other PhD-credentialed scientists who have dedicated their careers to understanding public health and how social injustice contributes to major public health problems. This compilation is the third edition of a book Barry Levy, MD, first coedited with Victor Sidel, MD, in 2005, with a second edition in 2013.
Purpose: The purpose is to provide a comprehensive approach to understanding inequality and health. With over 600 pages of material, including many tables of data and innumerable pages of cited materials, the book is impressively dense. While it addresses many different areas of public health addressed, the book lacks a deep dive into some topics. For example, global problems of war and social unrest could be better addressed as health problems that intersect with issues of violence, nutrition, and access to healthcare.
Audience: Given the comprehensive nature of this collection, the material is accessible and useful to a variety of people. While practitioners are not likely to refer to this book often, they would benefit from understanding how social injustice links to particular health problems. More likely, however, sociologists, behavioral health faculty, policy analysts, legislators, and nonprofit administrators would keep this book readily available on their shelves. Anyone researching and organizing for equal access to healthcare and public health advances will find great value in the vast amount of data and the concise overview of key problems. Dr. Levy, and the late Dr. Sidel, are uniquely qualified to provide this information. Dr. Levy is a physician/epidemiologist and an MPH with expertise in occupational and environmental health. He has many publications and has served on medical school faculty and as president of the American Public Health Association.
Features: The book is packed full of data, rich with details, and organized into four key sections. The first is an introduction to how injustices impact social health. The second section discusses 10 specific groups whose health is affected by injustice including women, people of color, inmates, and displaced refugees and migrants. Different areas of public health that face the challenge of injustice is the focus of the third section, including nutrition, violence, and oral health. The book ends with eight chapters on how to address social injustices in health. This is a call to action for readers. The book is well organized around the four sections, with well-selected experts to write about each topic. Each chapter is a standalone article that can be accessed for a quick overview of a topic. There are also several boxes that highlight a particular debate or tangential issue. These are indicated in the table of contents and are also easy access resources. Each chapter has its own list of references, highlighting the academic prominence of each piece. The index enables readers to quickly find an article (or chapter) on a topic of interest. While there are no color images, and very few images or photos at all, this is really a reference in which images are less important. Additional photos might enhance the material but would likely lengthen an already large book considerably.
Assessment: This is an important reference that fills a need in the field. Issues of public health, especially issues of social injustice, are ever-changing. Few books stay relevant for very long after publication. In the six years since Levy (and Sidel) last edited this book, much has changed in the public health landscape. The updated data points presented in this edition are helpful to researchers and practitioners alike. Another recent title, also a third edition, is Health Disparities in the United States: Social Class, Race, Ethnicity, and the Social Determinants of Health, 3rd edition, Barr (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). Dr. Barr's book is specifically designed for students of health and inequality in the U.S. and compiles updated information about race and class as predictors of health. This book, however, serves more as a source of reference material that informs debates and launches conversations that might lead to change.