Books like Global Health Priority-Setting

We often think about intervention as questions of states intervening against other states, violating their legitimate sovereign claims.

This book complicates this picture. It focuses on less violent and risky types of intervention, by a variety of actors, showing how intervention can vary in how much it opposes institutions and how coercive it is.

One example Rafanelli gives is of Tostan (an international NGO that runs community empowerment programs in Western Africa) that works against practices such as female genital cutting and child marriage.

This significantly complicates the simplistic picture of intervention, often proposed by those wanting to reject measures to tackle human rights abuses. Such forms of intervention might be required to help protect democracy globally.

In this meticulously researched book, Farrell and Newman explore how the U.S. has reshaped the global economic system, using financial networks, supply chains, and digital infrastructure as instruments of geopolitical influence.

The book does a good job at highlighting the ways in which global systems are manipulated to serve strategic ends, often with profound implications for sovereignty and dignity.

I recommend this book because it provides a compelling look at how economic interdependence—a cornerstone of global cooperation—has become a subtle yet powerful mechanism for exerting influence and control. It echoes my long-held conviction that the complex web of global relationships is a dynamic arena for power struggles, where economic dependencies can be weaponised to serve political interests and strategic dominance.

This book really brought home to me the transnational side of rising global authoritarianism.

We know a lot about democratic decline within countries and the changing global order. This book differs as it powerfully documents the transnational links between dictators across the world, working together like never before. 

This is even if they are not particularly close or share ideology. Dictators are simply collaborating to enrich themselves by propagating authoritarianism globally and undermining democracy.

It’s also very engagingly written with some powerful vignettes.

As the world is becoming more autocratic, we often think in terms of "autocracies" and "democracies."

This book helps us to move away from this state-centric approach. It really brought home to me that we should focus on authoritarian practices, where even generally liberal actors can engage in authoritarian practices sometimes.

This helps us to much better understand how the world is changing as it is becoming more autocratic.

Steinberg is one of South Africa’s great writers of narrative non-fiction; his work is oddly little known outside his home country and it was of huge value to me when I discovered it, not long after I moved to Johannesburg.

This book tracks the progress of a testing and treatment program in Lusikisiki, which had one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world. Part of the story is told through the eyes of a white doctor who expects that, once treatment is there, everyone will seek it out – and a young Black man named Sizwe, clever and successful, who shows all the reasons why HIV response is not as simple as opening up a clinic.

Steinberg’s book probes into some of the messier, less-well-understood dynamics that have driven the pandemic, and features voices rarely heard outside a community like Lusikisiki.

Sometimes I regret not having experienced the sex and drugs enjoyed by my contemporaries who came out much younger in life. The Christodora brought me back to reality. The reality of those years was much darker than my fantasies.

Murphy sketches out the diverse group of intertwined characters that inhabit the Christodora, a gentrified building in Manhattan’s East Village. I wanted to be the artistic Mateo who pushes through life’s difficulties to live an actualized life. But I can’t escape that I could have been one of the AIDS victims for whom the activism Murphy describes was so critical. Or I might have been Hector, an AIDS activist who descends into substance abuse after losing his lover.

Christodora recounts the heartbreak of AIDS but ultimately is a story of the healing of broken lives.

This is the first book I read about sex tourism, which is a growing part of the market for sex work in developing countries. 

This book focuses on the men who provide services to men who are travelling to the Dominican Republic to engage with sex workers. Most of the men in this book identify as “straight” and have to navigate their personal identity and relationships while earning a living providing this service to other men.

I also really like the way this book discusses the health risks and how sex workers use various strategies to minimize the risk to themselves and their partners in an occupation that places them in the cross-hairs of an international market for sex tourism.

Tell the Wolves I’m Home is literary and lyrical and it broke my heart into a thousand pieces while simultaneously piecing it back together again.

When June loses her beloved Uncle Finn at the height of the AIDs epidemic, she also loses the person who understands her the most. Then she forms a friendship with the partner he left behind, Toby, and together they help each other through the loneliness they both feel without him.

I liked that this book isn’t afraid to explore complicated relationships – especially between siblings. It also shines a light on a time when ignorance caused so much pain, through characters who are confused, flawed, and deeply human. The writing is beautiful.  

Emily Martin’s work was some of the first things I read when I wanted to understand how we understand medicine.

There’s such a gap between the health information we’re given and what we actually believe and Martin really covers how Americans have understood the concept of immunity and how we’re influenced by popular culture and the media.

This book is absolutely crucial for understanding both how we look at immunity and understanding how doctors are not free of bias. 

A big mistake in much radical analysis is to characterize problems in dualistic terms that externalize responsibility from Africa (Rodney, of course, is wide open to that critique). Thus, colonialism is not just irredeemably bad but simple to identify and directly related to white skin. The end of formal colonialism provided new targets in sometimes caricature form: black-skin-white-mask neocolonialism and neoliberalism, notably. Such things undoubtedly exist. However, Kenworthy’s brilliant, gob-smacking analysis of the unintended consequences of life-saving technologies reveals levels of complexity and complicity that belie easy dualisms. How does something that promises liberation from mass suffering and death (anti-retroviral drugs) become a machine to entrench corrupt elites and opportunistic NGOs, to sell cheap textiles in America, and to exploit poor women’s unremunerated care work? Read, weep, and lose your illusions about corporate social responsibility.