Here are 100 books that Infections and Inequalities fans have personally recommended if you like
Infections and Inequalities.
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I grew up in rural northern Michigan. My family lived in comfort, never lacking essentials. Yet, many of those living around me had difficulty making ends meet. Many lacked health insurance and year-round jobs. As a child, I viewed my community as normal and typical of the American experience. In many ways, it was–in part, that is the point of this list. At the time, I didn’t know that we could do better for those around me who worked so hard daily. Now I do. I selected these books to highlight the vast disparities between those with and without the comfort and luxury of good health.
Life expectancy among the working-class population in the United States was decreasing at an astounding rate well before the Covid-19 pandemic. While I was aware of growing inequality and decreasing access to health care for many, I didn’t realize how desperate the conditions of life seemed for many working-class Americans.
This book forced me to confront the uncomfortable reality of the health crisis among the many blue-collar workers living in the heartland of America.
A New York Times Bestseller A Wall Street Journal Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year A New Statesman Book to Read
From economist Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, a groundbreaking account of how the flaws in capitalism are fatal for America's working class
Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row-a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern times. In the…
What happens to aid projects after the money is spent? Or the people and communities once the media spotlight has left?
No Dancing, No Dancing follows the return journey of a former aid worker back to the site of three major humanitarian crises—South Sudan, Iraq and East Timor—in search of…
I grew up in New York City listening to my parents’ stories of extreme hardship and suffering during the Nazi occupation of their native Greece—and the courageous resistance they and many Greeks mounted. I’m outraged by the unfairness of extreme poverty in the midst of plenty and motivated to fight for economic justice. In the early 1980s, as homelessness was first becoming a crisis, I got involved in legal advocacy to address it, first as a volunteer lawyer and then as a full-time advocate. I believe housing is a human right and that no one should be homeless in a country as rich as the US.
I read this book in its entirety while sitting all day in a hospital waiting room on Christmas Eve after taking my husband to the ER that morning. I was scared and anxious and needed something to take my mind off my worries, and this did the trick.
It grabbed my attention, engaged my mind, and was so well written that it was easy to read despite my distress. The sense of outrage threaded throughout the book, backed up by key facts, propelled the book forward and kept me focused. Thankfully, my husband is fully recovered from his broken rib and is fine.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a “provocative and compelling” (NPR) argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.
“Urgent and accessible . . . Its moral force is a gut punch.”—The New Yorker
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2023: The Washington Post, Time, Esquire, Newsweek, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Elle, Salon, Lit Hub, Kirkus Reviews
The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow…
I don’t know how much of who we are is determined by genetics, and how much is from the environment, but I enjoy using characters and stories to explore the question. My scientific and medical background allows me to pull from my training, clinical patients, and scientific studies to create stories that explore characters who are at the precipice of a problem and need to fight against their inner beliefs to learn who they truly are. It’s like a chess game, moving the pieces around the board to see which side will win!
This novel took much of America by storm, and I am no different.
I love the voice of Demon Copperhead, which bleeds from the Appalachian Mountains. He has endured more trauma over his early years than most people do in several lifetimes. I think what’s most endearing about this novel is that it is sadly believable. Demon is a boy whose local environment has doomed him before he took his first breath. He’s the kind of boy who is just hoping for a break, and as the reader, all I wanted to do was adopt him and give him a good home.
And of course, it did win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, so that probably means something!
Demon's story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking 'like a little blue prizefighter.' For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.
In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn't an idea, it's as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn't an abstraction, it's neighbours, parents, and friends. 'Family' could mean love, or reluctant foster…
What happens to aid projects after the money is spent? Or the people and communities once the media spotlight has left?
No Dancing, No Dancing follows the return journey of a former aid worker back to the site of three major humanitarian crises—South Sudan, Iraq and East Timor—in search of…
I grew up in rural northern Michigan. My family lived in comfort, never lacking essentials. Yet, many of those living around me had difficulty making ends meet. Many lacked health insurance and year-round jobs. As a child, I viewed my community as normal and typical of the American experience. In many ways, it was–in part, that is the point of this list. At the time, I didn’t know that we could do better for those around me who worked so hard daily. Now I do. I selected these books to highlight the vast disparities between those with and without the comfort and luxury of good health.
People often think of poverty as an urban phenomenon, but many of the most impoverished locations in the US are distinctly rural–and many of the families living in these places have faced poverty for decades.
This book took me on a tour through several of these towns in the hills of Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, and other small towns dotted throughout the country. Along the way, I saw how perpetual poverty is derived from the deep and long-lasting history of slavery, Jim Crow, and the firm exploitation of the less fortunate. Each of these, and more, bring poverty to the present.
This book forced me to consider the many simultaneous and interrelated aspects of poverty and explained to me why poverty of place is so hard to change without concentrated and multifaceted effort.
A sweeping and surprising new understanding of extreme poverty in America from the authors of the acclaimed $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America.
“This book forces you to see American poverty in a whole new light.” (Matthew Desmond, author of Poverty, by America and Evicted)
Three of the nation’s top scholars – known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America – turn their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America’s most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice.…
The world is growing more turbulent, and every leader today has to be ready to be a crisis leader. I have been studying and teaching leadership and crisis leadership at Harvard for more than two decades. I have deployed to major incidents such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and trained crisis teams around the world. I have seen that effective crisis leaders make “worst days” better. They unite and inspire, they protect communities, and, most important, they save lives. That’s why I have a passion to help current and aspiring leaders ready themselves and their organizations for whatever the world throws at them.
This is another counter-intuitive recommendation, but I find I learn a lot about leading by getting outside the confines of leadership books.
Heller is a pioneer in social design, solving complex challenges by working with communities rather than doing something to them. The emphasis on listening and iterating solutions are directly applicable to leading through crisis and change. The process she outlines is approachable and her stories compelling. My copy has lotsof highlighting.
For me, Heller’s approach takes away the pressure of trying to have all the answers by reminding me that when you ask the right questions and involve the right people, the answers will emerge.
"As homo sapiens' entry in any intergalactic design competition, industrial civilization would be tossed out at the qualifying round." - David Orr, Earth in Mind
Design has built global brands, disrupted industries, and transformed our lives with technology. It has also contributed to the complex challenges we face today. In The Intergalactic Design Guide, business strategist and designer Cheryl Heller shows how social design can help address our most pressing challenges, from poverty to climate change.
Social design offers a new approach to navigate uncertainty, increase creativity, strengthen relationships, and develop our capacity to collaborate. Innovative leaders like Paul Farmer,…
From the time I heard of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that killed over 200,000 people, my heart was drawn to that country. From 2012 to 2017 I lead five mission trips to Cap Haitian, where we toured mission work, helped Haitians build an elementary school, and met so many of these beautiful people. I ate the great cooking of “Mama Jo” who, along with her husband, hosted us. I gave “horsey” rides to children at a Port-au-Prince orphanage; and shared in prayer and singing with churches near Cap Haitian. In short, I fell in love with these people. How could I notwrite a novel of hope about them?
If you are looking for a book on Haiti's challenges, and whether or not there is long-term hope for this country, this is the book you should choose. The late Paul Farmer was a physician who has been involved for many years in improving Haiti's healthcare system, and after the 2010 earthquake worked with people like former US President Bill Clinton in helping the country to "build back better." I read the book between my first and second trips to Haiti and found it to be a treasure-trove of information on Haiti’s background, as well as sources of hope.
Paul Farmer, doctor and aid worker, offers an inspiring insider's view of the relief effort.", Financial Times The book's greatest strength lies in its depiction of the post-quake chaos, In the book's more analytical sections the author's diagnosis of the difficulties of reconstruction is sharp." , Economist A gripping, profoundly moving book, an urgent dispatch from the front by one of our finest warriors for social justice." ,Adam Hochschild His honest assessment of what the people trying to help Haiti did well,and where they failed,is important for anyone who cares about the country or international aid in general." , Miami…
I grew up on a small farm, expecting to return to it after college, but I was inspired by books and by a teacher to focus instead on alleviating hunger and poverty problems in developing countries and two years working with the rural poor in Colombia in the Peace Corps helped me understand the need to attack these problems at both the household and policy levels. I taught courses and wrote on agricultural development issues at Virginia Tech for forty years and managed agricultural projects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. I am passionate about improving food security and human health and treating people with respect regardless of their circumstances.
I found the total dedication of Dr. Paul Farmer to solving the medical needs of the poor in Haiti, Peru, and elsewhere in the developing world through a combination of grassroots effort and high-level policymaking inspiring, to say the least.
The author of this biographical classic is a master of detail who captures the protagonist's complex essence and the stark medical reality facing the poorest of the poor. His story demonstrates how one person can profoundly affect the world, in this case, solving global health problems despite enduring tremendous personal sacrifice.
Tracy Kidder's critically acclaimed adult nonfiction work, Mountains Beyond Mountains has been adapted for young people by Michael French. In this young adult edition, readers are introduced to Dr. Paul Farmer, a Harvard-educated doctor with a self-proclaimed mission to transform healthcare on a global scale. Farmer focuses his attention on some of the world's most impoverished people and uses unconventional ways in which to provide healthcare, to achieve real results and save lives.
Growing up in a post-industrial city that bore the scars of urban renewal, I developed an early fascination with historic preservation. I began my studies as an architecture major; by my second year, I switched to American history because my passion lay in studying and understanding existing buildings and landscapes. Preserved is the product of inspiration that hit me when I spotted a beautifully preserved funeral home. Most of the neighborhood’s nineteenth-century refined residential fabric had been erased, but the grand Italianate mansion served as a reminder of what the area was like at the start of the twentieth century. At that moment, I realized that this was a story worth telling.
For several years, I’ve been teaching a course called the American Way of Death, and Sara Jensen Carr’s The Topography of Wellness features prominently on my syllabus.
Carr explores how soaring mortality rates in the nineteenth century, mostly from diseases like cholera and tuberculosis, prompted an army of public health reformers, urban planners, and municipal leaders to tackle the toxic urban landscape by envisioning and creating a new landscape with the kinds of infrastructure that today we take for granted. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the new and improved city, with its public water and sewer systems and public parks, was benefiting both rich and poor alike.
Carr is quick to point out, of course, that scientific and political notions of health and wellness continue to shape our nation’s landscape, with mixed outcomes, mostly as a result of systemic inequities and unequal access to the kinds of urban…
The COVID-19 pandemic has re-ignited discussions of how architects, landscapes, and urban planners can shape the environment in response to disease. This challenge is both a timely topic and one with an illuminating history. In The Topography of Wellness, Sara Jensen Carr offers a chronological narrative of how six epidemics transformed the American urban landscape, reflecting changing views of the power of design, pathology of disease, and the epidemiology of the environment. From the infectious diseases of cholera and tuberculosis, to so-called "social diseases" of idleness and crime, to the more complicated origins of today's chronic diseases, each illness and…
I studied retellings as I prepared to write my own take on The Secret Garden. Retelling a classic story can not only usher something like The Secret Garden or Peter Pan into our current time and place in history, but it can also awaken the wonder and magic many of us experienced when reading these tales for the first time in a new generation. It’s been so fun for me to see how modern authors put their own spin on these stories, and I hope you will enjoy them too.
This contemporary retelling of The Secret Garden sets the story in a closed-down tuberculosis sanitarium. Roo's journey to uncover the mysteries of the house and bring life to the garden tucked away inside it unfolds beautifully on the page. With well-developed characters, a deeply haunting revelation, and a setting that springs to life with vivid detail, this was a great take on a classic.
Hiding is Roo Fanshaw's special skill. Living in a frighteningly unstable family, she often needs to disappear at a moment's notice. When her parents are murdered, it's her special hiding place under the trailer that saves her life.
As it turns out, Roo, much to her surprise, has a wealthy if eccentric uncle, who has agreed to take her into his home on Cough Rock Island. Once a tuberculosis sanitarium for children of the rich, the strange house is teeming with ghost stories and secrets. Roo doesn't believe in ghosts or fairy stories, but what are those eerie noises she…
I thought my scientific career peaked in 6th grade when I won the science fair since soon after, all my spare time went to ballet. In college, a broken foot prompted a shift from dance to arts journalism, and then an unplanned pregnancy, complicated birth, and postpartum depression prompted a shift to writing about women’s health. From this, I branched out to various types of science and history, always through the lens of feminism. As an author and journalist, my job is to be professionally curious; I’m always asking why, how, and where: Why are things the way they are? How did they get that way? And where are the women?
When it comes to writing and reading history, I’m particularly partial to the “group portrait.” Don’t get me wrong—I love a good biography of a single person—but there’s just something about telling the story of multiple people in the same position or movement that really makes for a dynamic story.
This book sheds light on the remarkable story of the Black women nurses who cared for the poorest victims of New York’s tuberculosis epidemic of the 1930s. It’s a deeply researched and caringly written tale showing the dedication and persistence of some of the most important, yet underappreciated medical professionals in history.
Black Angels tells the true story of 300 black nurses who changed the course of history, beginning in 1929 when white nurses staged a walk out at Staten Island's 2000-bed TB sanatorium, threatening New York with a public health catastrophe. City health officials made a radical decision to sanction a national call for 'colored nurses'. Lured by the promise of good pay, education, housing and most of all, a rare opportunity to work in a hospital free of quotas and segregated wards, 'Black Angels' from all over the country boarded trains and buses to enter wards that held both hope…
