Health, illness and addiction: social aspects

Everyone knows what intoxication and drunkenness are, what they look like, how to define and measure them and what their consequences are. At least we might assume so given the ways these words are used by the media, by politicians and policy makers and...

In this expanded edition of a widely praised book, now available for the first time in North America, the renowned journalist Patrick Cockburn looks at his experience of contracting polio as a child in the context of a new pandemic, that of COVID-19. The...

The strange and surprising history of the so-called epidemic of bad posture in modern America - from eugenics and posture pageants to today's promoters of 'paleo posture.'In 1995, a scandal erupted when the New York Times revealed that...

'The leprosy epidemic is slowly but surely fading away,' says WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. The number of leprosy patients in the world was once in the millions, but new cases have declined to around 200,000 a year, thanks to the...

From the National Book Award winner, a powerful and timely rumination on how we can draw on historical examples of 'survivor power' to understand the upheaval and death caused by the COVID-19 pandemic-and collectively heal. In this...

Four decades afterAnd the Band Played Oncreated an image of the AIDS epidemic that has survived in the public consciousness to this very day, mathematician Rebecca Culshaw is sounding the alarm that everything that iconic book told us about AIDS is...

Photographer Malcolm Linton and writer Jon Cohen present haunting images and stories from Tijuana, Mexico, to show the distance that separates aspiration from reality in the quest to end AIDS. Malcolm Linton is a photo and video journalist based in New...

This book explores prejudice towards groups who are thought to have caused and spread the COVID-19 virus. The book examines four cases around the world: the residents of Wuhan, China; Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in the USA, Britain and Israel;...

The question is no longer if we should end the war on drugs but how do we do it.We urgently need to legalize and regulate drugs this book explains why, and how to do it. The human and financial costs of 50 years of drug war are vast but there's a better...

A suspenseful, authoritative account of how the battle against a mid-century polio epidemic sparked a revolution in medical care.Americans knew polio as the 'summer plague'. In countries further North, however, the virus arrived later...

*Joint Winner of Oral History Australia Book Award, 2021**Shortlisted in the 2021 Victorian Community History Awards, Oral History Award*The people who volunteered to help during the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s provided compassion and...

Unlike other books on epidemics, which either focus on the science behind how microbes cause disease or tell first-person accounts of one particular disease, Epidemics: The Impact of Germs and Their Power over Humanity takes a holistic approach to...

After Lifeis a collective history of how Americans experienced, navigated, commemorated, and ignored mass death and loss during the global COVID-19 pandemic, mass uprisings for racial justice, and the near presidential coup in 2021 following the 2020...

Once home to the United States's largest plutonium production site, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state is laced with 56 million gallons of radioactive waste. The threat of an explosive accident at Hanford is all too real-an event that...

Anxiety, Modern Society, and the Critical Method interrogates the historical intersections of political economy, technology, and anxiety. By analyzing and building upon the tools developed by critical theorists to diagnose the symptoms of modern...

Did the Covid virus jump naturally from an animal species to humans, or did it escape from a laboratory experiment? In this essay, science writer Nicholas Wade explores the two scenarios and argues that, on present evidence, lab escape is the more likely...

Birthing Liberation presents reproductive justice as the pathway to equity and the birthplace of liberation.Sabia C. Wade, renowned radical doula and educator,speaks to the intersections of systemic issues-such as access to health care, house...

In this rich, eye-opening, and uplifting anthology, dozens of esteemed writers, poets, artists, and translators from more than thirty countries send literary dispatches from life during the pandemic. A portion of proceeds benefit booksellers in need.As...

Whether for entertainment, under the guise of medicine, or to propel consumerism, heinous acts are perpetrated daily on women's bodies. In Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes, award-winning journalist Anne Elizabeth Moore catalogs the global...

The follow-up to the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology The Remedy: new ways of imagining what LGBTQ+ health care should look like.What if you could trust in getting the health care you need in ways that felt good and helped you thrive? What if the...

This anthology is a diverse collection of real-life stories from queer and trans people on their own health-care experiences and challenges, from gay men living with HIV who remember the systemic resistance to their health-care needs, to a lesbian couple...

Examines the complexity and the humanity of the opioid epidemicAmerica's opioid epidemic continues to ravage families and communities, despite intense media coverage, federal legislation, criminal prosecutions, and harm reduction efforts to prevent...

Writtenwith wisdom, genuine humor, and down-to-earth observations, We Know HowThis Ends is far more than a memoir about life with ALS. It is adignified, courageous, and unflinching look at how acceptance of loss and inevitabledeath can...

In the final days of 2019, a new and deadly virus was quietly spreading through the city of Wuhan, China. Within six months it would kill half a million people worldwide, infect a further 10 million, and change the way all of us live, work and play...

The Earth is flat, the World Trade Center collapse was a controlled demolition, planes are spraying poison to control the weather, and actors faked the Sandy Hook massacre....All these claims are bunk: falsehoods, mistakes, and in some cases, outright...

We need a vision of how medicine might serve the good of the whole human person: the body's health, but also the health of that "piece of divinity in us."Medicine, so long as you don't need it, is a tangential part of life, just one more profession among...

This book evolved from the crises of 2020: fighting a pandemic, climate catastrophe, and racial injustice.The author's previous book The Green New Deal and Beyondwas published in April 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, so it, obviously, suffered...

A comprehensive and richly illustrated introduction to the world of viruses.As parasites that are often hundreds of times smaller than bacteria, viruses exist in and on everything, everywhere. Rapidly evolving, they are highly opportunistic and...

How the politicization of the pandemic endangers our lives-and our democracyCOVID-19 has killed more people than any war or public health crisis in American history, but the scale and grim human toll of the pandemic were not inevitable. Pandemic Politics...

On April 26, 1986, Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in then Soviet Ukraine. More than 3.5 million people in Ukraine alone, not to mention many citizens of surrounding countries, are still suffering the effects. Life Exposed is the...