SMA - in print: book reviews by our members, for our site
Title: Politics and Poetics of Migration: Narratives of Iranian Women from the Diaspora
Author: Dossa, Parin
This book uses gendered stories of displacement and re-settlement to interrogate our understanding of social suffering and justice. Parin Dossa, an anthropologist, argues that systemic inequity and exclusionary practices impact the health and well-being of marginalized people. Using narrative accounts of Canadian Iranian women, this book links individual experiences of migration to social and political factors. Dossa challenges conventional thinking that interprets social suffering in terms of personal stake and individual accountability. She questions the ways in which racialized and gendered inequality in Canada are perceived as cultural difference instead of social oppression.
Yet this book is far from a laundry list of social determinants of migration and health. Dossa’s illustrative stories are linked to a poetics of migration that shows the remaking of a world with a more informed sense of social justice. A pioneering study on migration and storytelling, this book is an important contribution to medical anthropology, migration and gender studies.
Date of Publication: 2004
Publisher: Canadian Scholar’s Press, Inc., Toronto
Cost: $24.95 sc.
Additional Comments: Parin Dossa is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. She is the co-producer of two videos: New Voices: Ethnic Elders in Canada and Out of the Shadows: Narratives of Women with Development Disabilities, and has written extensively on migration, gender and health.
Link to Other Review: A Review by Jason Hannan. Republished online with the generous permission of Jason Hannan and the Canadian Ethnic Studies Journal: http://www.cspi.org/books/p/dossa.pdf
(Submitted by Mark Nichter, University of Arizona, 8/05)
Title: Powerful medicines: the benefits, risks and costs of prescription drugs.
Author: Avorn J.
Reading this book is like sitting on the side of a hill watching a faulty train full of happy passengers hurtling towards inevitable catastrophe and being powerless to stop it happening. In fact it's like watching wreck after wreck take place. In these cases the trains are manufactured by the pharmaceutical industry, the passengers are the trusting patients and the drivers are the prescribers who appear blind to the possibility that there could be any danger ahead. The controllers and signallers are the regulatory authorities who may be in the pay of the train's manufacturers or dominated by politicians (Quote by John Marley that captures the spirit of the book)
Keywords: pharmaceutical behavior and industry
Date of Publication: 2004
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Additional Comments: Well balanced, USA focused
(Submitted by Mark Nichter, University of Arizona, 8/05)
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