Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor
Where to buy Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor books online?
- ISBN13: 9780520243262
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Pathologies of Power uses upsetting tales 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 effective in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world’s poor is the most vital human rights struggle of our times. With passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the stressed 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 additional. Farmer shows that the same social forces that give rise to epidemic diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis also form 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 renovate 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 reflect 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.
Buy Cheap Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor Online
Related posts:
- The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History
- Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights
- Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior
- Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids about Money¿that the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!
- Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money–That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!
I admit I do not write well. But neither does this leader. The best part of this book is the first couple chapters when he talks about his life experiences in Haiti, Russia, and Mexico. After that place the book down. The rest of this book isn’t really all ears. He seems to repeat himself every additional chapter. I just didn’t get his structure. I didn’t really agree with his conclusions… although I don’t reflect he really had any. He sort of implies what should be done, but I don’t reflect that is the point of this point.
To me it seemed like a man who doesn’t like what is going on with third world medicine and chose to rant about it. Not really going anywhere with it, just rant. If you agree with his thoughts/conclusions/rants you may like this book, but I don’t reflect it will sway anyone.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
How are we all reliable for each additional? This book will bring that tie reasonably clear.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Buy this book! Paul Farmer is a highly effective individual, and shows how one man can and did make a difference. He opens the window on what’s going on in Latin America.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
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 cut-rate 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 mad. His emotions are certainly 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 nearly 30 years. I’ve agreed this book to my sons who are young physicians. The diligence 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.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
This book is a collection of several essays that Dr. Farmer wrote while he was on-site in several of the areas where Partners in Health (an org he co-founded, which provides healthcare for the poor, regardless of ability to pay, including case management of complex diseases such as HIV and multidrug resistant TB) run. From Haiti to Chiapas to the TB colonies in Russia’s prisons to Boston’s slums, Farmer–ever the anthropologist–is able to see beyond the symptoms he treats and points to a common cause for the poverty, disease, and suffering that he and his colleagues try to alleviate: structural violence. Hence, what one reviewer (who gave an unfavorable review) commented: that what he wrote is repetitive. I reflect that was the point Farmer was trying to make: these problems all have the same cause.
The book is divided into two parts: in the first part, he describes the situation; in the second part, he provides analysis. Structural violence is the thread that is natural fiber through all of these essays. The overall effect, as you can guess, is unpleasant. After finishing this book, I had the same feeling in my stomach I got when I saw a motorist deliberately run over a slow-moving critter crossing the road late one night. It is a feeling of rage and revulsion, which Farmer–ever the physician–seeks to treat with the very last chapter (Rethinking health and human rights).
I admit his prose sometimes ventures out into the realm of the abstract (he is an literary after all), but concrete tales about people being beaten by soldiers and left for dead make his message loud and clear. He is mad about what he sees and he wants us to be mad too, and rightly so. Why, he questions, in the age of medical advancements and human rights, do we continue to see people dying ’stupid deaths’ from preventable causes? It is an vital question to question, agreed that the fields of medicine and human rights generally reflect they don’t have anything to do with each additional. This book should be required reading for anyone who is studying medicine, be it clinical or public health. It should also be required reading for anyone who thinks about studying international human rights law. Finally, concerned citizens of ‘donor countries’ would be interested to read this book too, if only to urge our lawmakers to make sure that our tax money is not being used to fund dictatorships and dirty proxy wars.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5