Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2019 - Science & Technology — Engineering — Environmental Studies

Wilson writes in the second chapter that "most viruses, viewed under the microscope, have a beauty to them.... The Ebola virus is not beautiful." This text traces the history of Ebola from its origins to the 2013 outbreak. Unlike previous outbreaks, this one quickly overtook the local health systems of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia and soon spread beyond the African borders. Deaths included many health care workers, crashing already fragile systems. Relief was not available as the politics of an underfunded World Health Organization came into play. Some countries, however, managed to halt the virus's progress--due in part to officials' aggressive efforts beginning with the first confirmed case. In the end, the 2013 Ebola pandemic was the worst in history. In addition, relaying various personal accounts from those affected by the virus, Wilson, a journalist, highlights the challenges of developing vaccines and antibody therapies due to a lack of profits and high liability. This is a thrilling read for anyone interested in international affairs, not merely scientists and those in public health.Summing Up: Recommended. All readers.

In March of 2014, the single largest Ebola viral outbreak to ever occur began in West Africa. Eventually, over 30,000 people contracted the disease and 17,000 died. Using this outbreak as their background, authors Sabeti (biology, Harvard) and Salahi, a journalist, examine factors which inhibited a unified response to this outbreak. Containing nine chapters, Outbreak Culture presents the results of personal accounts and qualitative research questionnaires of those most closely involved in the outbreak. They discuss factors that hindered the initial response and the impacts of those factors on the eventual number of deaths. The authors consider issues such as the lack of collaboration, the distrust between responding agencies and researchers, and the fear that arose from this lack of communication. The discussion of the Ebola outbreak throughout is presented in the context of outbreak responses in general. In the final chapter, Sabeti and Salahi present a framework to address these issues and what needs to be done to effectively address future global outbreaks. This book is a must read for anyone with an interest in disease outbreaks, pandemics, and the international response during an emerging crisis.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

Reproductive Injustice provides a powerful look at the disturbing and lingering disparity in premature births occurring among black women. Davis (City Univ. of New York, Center for the Study of Women and Society) exposes the high rate of premature births, often misattributed to class, found among educated and middle-class black women. Citing Jamaican-born British cultural theorist Stuart Hall, she restates the important insight that class is experienced and lived through race. She argues that medical racism is a pervading cause of premature birth as well as infant and maternal mortality among black women, and reveals its origins in the history of enslavement. Davis finds that the "afterlife of slavery" (quoting Saidiya Hartman) can be observed in both the overmedicalization of black reproduction and the diagnostic lapses that sometimes lead to fatal complications for mother and baby. Thus Davis presents a deterritorialized ethnography that covers time and space: her fieldwork with mothers, birth workers, and hospital staff illuminates a rich narrative encompassing black women's reproduction, the history of the March of Dimes, and development of the neonatal intensive care unit. A must read for students of anthropology, sociology, and medicine, particularly practitioners working with pregnancy and childbirth.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

The use of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) has raised several ethical and political issues in the modern US. Most center around the naturalness of such technologies and feminist concerns about how such technologies contribute to the exploitation and marginalization of women. One issue that has received far less attention is the role of race in these technologies. As Russell (Univ. of Oregon) explains, many people who use ART demonstrate a startling concern about race--or, more specifically, which combination of gametes will produce a child of a specific race. Though such concerns may appear surprising, especially considering scientific evidence that race lacks a genetic basis, Russell argues that ART is fundamentally a technology of kinship and parentage. As a tool for reproduction, therefore, the factoring in of race to produce offspring with specific characteristics is neither new nor unexpected. Throughout the book, Russell emphasizes how race operates throughout the use of ART and the political and social consequences of this relationship. His text is incredibly clear and accessible, and he makes a very important argument at its core. The book will prove useful to anyone who teaches or studies the philosophy of race, philosophy of medicine, medical humanities, or bioethics.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

Mobile Workshop is the most important book on tsetse history since John Ford's forbidding 1971 Role of the Trypanosomiases in African Ecology. The title expresses how parasites, flies, animals, people, technologies, and knowledge move within landscapes. As vectors whose bite transmits often-fatal cattle and human trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), mhesvi/tsetse flies severely limit settlement and economy on a continent where cattle are essential. (In Zambia, the little buggers bit this reviewer painfully and repeatedly, fortunately infecting only cattle.) The flies are a long-intractable problem despite concerted, costly control efforts. European science appropriated well-established African comprehension of mhesvi ecology, turning managed coexistence--avoidance, bush clearing, seasonal migration, etc.--into attempted eradication, yet the legendary menace persists. Negative consequences receive high priority: Zimbabweans endured forced labor and resettlement, wildlife destruction, and health hazards from pesticides, including cancer. Control methods even served settler-state counterinsurgency during the 1970s liberation war. As a Zimbabwean deeply embedding local knowledge and agency in his analysis, Mavhunga (Science, Technology, and Society, MIT) offers a robust populism. But complex concepts make difficult reading, and with numerous African words (especially in chidzimbahwe or "Shona" languages), a glossary and memorization are essential.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

The Civil Rights Act legally eliminated discrimination through Title VI, which required that any individual or institution receiving federal funding must practice racial integration. However, a racial divide and remnants of social injustices in the American healthcare system remain with us today. The Racial Divide in American Medicine, incorporating writings from an interdisciplinary group of experts, does an excellent job in chronicling the history of healthcare for American blacks, beginning with slave healthcare. The focus, however, is on the Civil Rights era and its link to past and present struggles and disparities.The book provides a historical and social context to the Civil Rights Movement by describing how black physicians in the state of Mississippi contributed to the movement, and by considering the progress that has been made since passage of the landmark legislation. The book is both interesting and easy to read; it will add to a library's collection in the areas of civil rights, medicine, public health, and American history. It is an important contribution in understanding the nation's progress and what can still be done to repair the racial divide. Extensive chapter notes facilitate the ability to locate additional sources.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Undergraduates through faculty and professionals.