Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2022 -

Venkat (Univ. of California, Los Angeles) invites readers on an in-depth journey into the history of tuberculosis in India. The text provides an excellent introduction to the field of medical anthropology. Carefully examining primary documents related to TB in India over 100 years, the text also reflects ethnographic interviews with professionals in India and visits to some of the large sanitoria that offered, before the era of antibiotics, the only treatment for TB. One fascinating chapter focuses on how, during the colonial era, the cure was always "elsewhere." When Indian people in England contracted TB, they were sent "back to India." English people in India suffering the same fate were sent "home to England." A belief that physiologically the Indian body and English body were fundamentally different was common. This narrative is filled with examples of local forms of reasoning about health and illness, presented in a nonjudgmental tone. Ultimately, Venkat asks the provocative question "What is a cure?" in light of the more recent discovery of antibiotic-resistant strains of TB. Adopting methods of linguistic analysis, Venkat contrasts textual evidence from, e.g., an English-language poster advertising antibiotics as "a sure cure for TB" with more nuanced Hindi expressions: "a full or finished course of therapy for proper cure."Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

The cholera outbreak and pandemic of 1962-1965 in mainland China, the focus of this book, was part of a larger cholera pandemic listed by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the seventh in world history, said to have originated in Indonesia in 1961 and still not declared over. Given the current COVID-19 pandemic, the book is of striking relevance and interest today. In addition to spreading in China, this cholera pandemic had reached India by 1964, the Soviet Union by 1966, and Italy by 1973 (via North Africa). Reports of cholera in China as early as 1960 suggest that Chinese migrant populations may have been the original source for the pandemic spread of the disease beginning in the 1960s. China remained a reservoir for decades. This assessment was advanced by a team of geneticists headed by Xavier Didelot, whose team focused on the genetic sequencing of the El Tor strain of the cholera bacterium, the type associated with the China outbreaks covered in the book. The Didelot study, based on detailed analysis of the genomes of 71 strains of cholera isolated in China, concludes that "China imported V. cholerae four times from South Asia (1975-2004), once from Indonesia (1955), and once from Southeast Asia (1986). In turn, China was the source of transmissions to South Asia (three times, 1967-1999), Indonesia (1960), and Southeast Asia (2007)." This complexity makes it "difficult to pinpoint the exact origins of outbreaks in other parts of the world. Even if China is not the direct origin for such outbreaks, it clearly represents an important reservoir of diversity which needs to be accounted for when modeling the global epidemiology of cholera." (1) The international epidemiology of cholera is not the main subject of the book under review, yet historian Fang (Nanyang Technological Univ., Singapore) uncovers considerable detail in chapter 1 ("The Origins of the Epidemic") on the Cold War movements of Chinese migrant and refugee populations between the homeland and Indonesia, partly resulting from popular anti-Chinese sentiment in that country and related bilateral treaty arrangements.

Asian American-authored medical and illness memoirs expose and disrupt "model minority" mythology, even as they appear to uphold its central tenets of hard work and productivity. In this exploration of memoirs by leading medical figures such as Sanjay Gupta, Atul Gawande, Michelle Au, and Audrey Young, among others, Lee (Univ. of California, Irvine) shows how the narrative of medical heroism has taken on a decidedly Asian American face through the literary production of such medical role model gurus. However, as the focus shifts to the illness memoir, through an examination of books and essays by, e.g., Paul Kalanithi, Fred Ho, Esme Weijun Wang, and Brandy Lien Worrall, the disruption of predictability accompanying confrontation with inevitable mortality creates a crisis in which both Asian American "exceptional mobility" (p. 79) and the totalizing power of medicine as a discipline are called into question. Lee effectively knits together analysis of immigration law and racial formation, framed by disability studies, to uplift a critical reading of these emergent genres of writing. Lee's often poignant and pointed readings turn militant by the closing pages of the book, where an epilogue evidently written during the nadir of the COVID lockdown appears. Occasional topical digressions in the text do not defeat its overall scholarly effectiveness.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

Anyone interested in epidemiology or the history of global pandemics will find this a riveting account of the most recent such crisis due to COVID-19 and its socioeconomic, political--but especially human--ramifications in China and beyond. Yang (Univ. of Pennsylvania) draws on dynamic media--blogs and podcasts--and conventional documents, including interviews, press releases, and news conferences. The most compelling voices come from the so-called lockdown diaries posted on, e.g., WeChat and Sina Weibo, on which the author draws liberally. Yang has previously articulated pertinent theory in The Power of the Internet in China (CH, Jan'10, 47-2828), and published a first account of these diaries in "Online Lockdown Diaries as Endurance Art," (AI & Society, 2021, doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01141-5). When physicians in Wuhan warned of the pandemic, censorship and control of all media followed. Subsequent anticensorship protests illustrate how actively citizens sought to subvert censorship through innovative use of the internet, and as Yang admits, "mere attempts to theorize look rather pale" (p. ii). Chapter 8 ("COVID Nationalism") documents the backlash against diarists as Western politicians directed blame for the pandemic on China. The WHO has cited China's "all-of-government, all-of-society" response to COVID-19. This book sharpens the description by focusing on the experience of ordinary citizens, living through the Wuhan nightmare in real time.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.