THE CURE FOR EVERYTHING: The Epic Struggle for Public Health and a Radical Vision for Human Thriving

THE CURE FOR EVERYTHING: The Epic Struggle for Public Health and a Radical Vision for Human Thriving
MICHELLE A. WILLIAMS with Linda Marsa
One World (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The inspiring story of how we overcame a history of infectious disease, poisonous environments, and early death and unlocked an explosion in human potential—and a vision for the work ahead to optimize human flourishing in the twenty-first century

Public health is an unusual discipline—a combination of science, sociology, politics, and logistics—with a simple goal: to create the conditions for human thriving. Despite a century of massive improvements in our health and quality of life, Americans—reeling from our disastrous pandemic response, epidemics of depression and isolation, and a failing healthcare system—are understandably distrustful of public health. But the true history of public health doesn’t just reveal one of the greatest feats in human history—our great escape from early death and infectious disease—it points toward a future of even greater improvements. The cure for everything? It’s all of us, working together for our collective health.

Michelle A. Williams, one of the country’s true innovators in public health, here tells the dramatic hidden history of public health in America: a story of how radicals and renegades—from W.E.B. Du Bois to Alice Hamilton to the activists of ACT UP—and the institutions and infrastructure we built together helped transform our world. As she takes readers through these dramatic stories, she draws out their deeper lessons. In the end, she makes a powerful argument that it is public health that should drive our country’s policies and politics—that if our policies fail to increase the health and well-being of everyone, regardless of race or economic status, we have failed as a society.

Here is a dramatic, sweeping history with a galvanizing vision for how we can address new threats and complete the unfinished business of public health.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Public health, in thae definition fronted by Wikipedia, is "the science and art of preventing disease" and I have only one quibble with this as a jumping-off point for studying the subject: the phrase is rightly "art, and science, of preventing disease."

Firstly the art of medicine is best acknowledged as such; secondly the science is a fully separate topic the way I've punctuated it. Both are crucial, essential components of the field we call "public health," along with huge doses of politics and other coalition-building matters. Author Williams has an impressive and extensive CV that demonstrates her knowledge of public health is not solely theoretical. Make no mistake, in a career of fortyish years Author Williams has worked on tough health problems as far afield from academia as Haitian perinatal health.

A wad of notes, a premise that explains her career, a publisher excited to present the book. It's all gone right so far. How about the story she's telling?

I came into adulthood as AIDS was making itself known. I had an anti-vaxxer mother who lied to the schools I attended that of course I'd been vaccinated! I hadn't apart from polio when I was two, my father...polio survivor himself...had it done and her fury was loud and scary to tiny little me, and smallpox, when my doctor just did it and told her afterwards she was an idiot and to pull her head out of her ass (in those words) and remember her little brother's death (he had been her own doctor in childhood). No others, no MMR, no DPT, I got the diseases instead. My interest, then, in the topic is rooted in personal experiences I wouldn't wish on anyone not named Trump.

Author Williams speaks to me directly by speaking of the people, the movers and shakers, the subversive insurgents, the deeply humane empaths and the policy wonks who completely devoted themselves to bettering the lives of their fellow humans. I really expected the read to leave me more admiring than impressed. It left me both. I don't think the prose, largely (I assume) penned by health-focused journalist Linda Marsa, is noteworthy, in either elegance or lack thereof. It is precise, it is selected with an aim in mind to inform, to convey huge swaths of research without making the layperson feel talked down to or left behind. It is a successful effort. It is a hugely important story of one of the most astounding, and undercelebrated, achievements made by individual people moving massive inertial forces by dint of sheer stubborn refusal to give up. These many people who worked to find reasons for catastrophes of preventable deaths on a scale I myownself quail before are celebrated and named. Their contributions are brought to your eyes for what is very often the first time.

I give the book all five stars because I have not read a more succinct, informative treatment of a subject within the history of science that is more pleasantly conversational, less irritatingly superior of tone, or more urgent to grasp. We are witnessing an appalling and potentially lethal dismantling of a system dedicated to public health. It behooves each of us to learn as much as possible about how we achieved the heights before we are cast back into the depths. It will, I expect, create a lot of new advocates for our threatened public health system.

KEVIN NGUYEN's latest, MỸ DOCUMENTS, a near-future I do not want

MỸ DOCUMENTS
KEVIN NGUYEN
One World (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The paths of four family members diverge drastically when the U.S. government begins detaining Vietnamese Americans, in this sharp and touching novel about growing up at the intersection of ambition and assimilation.

Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan grew up as cousins in the sprawling Nguyen family, but the truth about their family is much more complicated. As young adults, they're on the precipice of new ventures—Ursula as a budding journalist in Manhattan, Alvin as an engineering intern for Google, Jen as a naive freshman at NYU, and Duncan as a promising newcomer on his high school football team. Their lives are upended when a series of violent, senseless attacks across America create a national panic, prompting a government policy forcing Vietnamese Americans into internment camps. Jen and Duncan are sent with their mother to Camp Tacoma while Ursula and Alvin receive exemptions.

Cut off entirely from the outside world, Jen and Duncan try to withstand long dusty days in camp, forced to work jobs they hate and acclimate to life without the internet. That is until Jen discovers a way to get messages to the outside. Her first instinct is to reach out to Ursula, who sees this as an opportunity to tell the world about the horrors of detention—and bolster her own reporting career in the process.

Informed by real-life events from Japanese incarceration, the Vietnam War, and modern-day immigrant detention, Kevin Nguyen gives us a version of reality only a few degrees away from our own—much too close for comfort. Moving and finely attuned to both the brutalities and mundanities of racism in America, Mỹ Documents is a strangely funny and touching portrait of American ambition, fear, and family. The story of the Nguyens is one of resilience and how we return to each other, and to ourselves, after tragedy.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: How awful for Author Nguyen to publish this trenchant story at exactly the moment it becomes predictive. He didn't tell it with that in mind (it's not a paywall yet, you can dismiss it), saying in the article linked above that "...I worried that in all of the conversation around Mỹ Documents being timely, that its actual conflicts and themes had been obfuscated by the emphasis on the news cycle".

Steamrolled by events you thought you were extrapolating? It has to be the ultimate first sex in your stateroom on the Titanic feeling: Will I get to do this again? He's done it before. His first novel, New Waves, came out in March...of TWENTY-TWENTY. Melpomene seems to have it in for this poor author.

All that out of the way, let's have a look at the storyverse Author Nguyen's made for us. An absent father unites Ursula and Jen, half-sisters born to white and ethnically Vietnamese mothers respectively. Each woman has a full brother. Their appearance mirrors their mothers' features, so the elder appears white. She is a journalist, exempted from being incarcerated because of her less-visible paternal heritage. She is also not interested in exposing herself to difficulties by claiming kin with her incarcerated half-sibs...a continuation of her uninterest in becoming close to these people...until their connection can be useful

As the internment camp's realities begin to bite her, no internet, limited contact outside the confines of the camp or even within it, no access to any communication technology. Jen becomes part of an in-camp samizdat operation called Korematsu. Ow, my nose. That gives her something Ursula the journalist needs: reliable intel from the inside of a buttoned-up space. The sisters, with poor grace on both sides, cooperate to tell The Truth About It. How that pans out, well...white people, even half-white people prosper in correlation to their willingness to become exploiters, says Author Nguyen of Ursula; glittering kudos, lucrative contracts rain on her. Jen, her source, is traumatized by hellish deprivation and the loss of the brother she loved and Ursula did not care a fig about.

And here is where I talk about the characters, not their arcs. The absent father was a rolling stone who was too damaged...by what?...to contemplate settling down. Why the hell he didn't use a condom instead of fathering kids he wasn't around to raise remains unaddressed. (Selfishness, of course, but it's unaddressed.) Ursula and her full sib are All American White People, Jen and her full sib are not. My, that's tidy. The mothers barely registered on me. That's why there's no part of a fifth star.

The ending of the story finds Jen and Ursula...Ursula's sib vanishes somewhere along the line...completing their trajectories as set. It's all pretty pat. What it isn't is poorly told. I'm not saying "described" here by considered usage. We are not centered in a physical locale. That is not the story being told. There's little scene-setting beyond what is needed to get the immediate point across. This is, for some readers, a huge flaw. To my read of the book it is the way to immerse you in (mostly Ursula's) development, and by extension, the entire exercise's purpose of indicting our culture for simply accepting injustice, for treating injustice as infotainment, and criticizing the people seduced by empty plaudits into betrayals of human bonds that are, by rights, sacred and cherished.

Pay attention to the people who wander, all unmoored. Ask yourself why that is the choice they made for a life spent among other humans. Is it a choice you can understand?

Listening to Ursula, I can do so better than before I read this book.

WOMAN OF LIGHT, astounding first novel though not first book

WOMAN OF LIGHT
KALI FAJARDO-ANSTINE
One World
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A dazzling epic of betrayal, love, and fate that spans five generations of an Indigenous Chicano family in the American West, from the author of the National Book Award Finalist Sabrina & Corina

“There is one every generation—a seer who keeps the stories.”

Luz “Little Light” Lopez, a tea leaf reader and laundress, is left to fend for herself after her older brother, Diego, a snake charmer and factory worker, is run out of town by a violent white mob. As Luz navigates 1930’s Denver on her own, she begins to have visions that transport her to her Indigenous homeland in the nearby Lost Territory. Luz recollects her ancestors’ origins, how her family flourished and how they were threatened. She bears witness to the sinister forces that have devastated her people and their homelands for generations. In the end, it is up to Luz to save her family stories from disappearing into oblivion.

Written in Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s singular voice, the wildly entertaining and complex lives of the Lopez family fill the pages of this multigenerational western saga. Woman of Light is a transfixing novel about survival, family secrets, and love, filled with an unforgettable cast of characters, all of whom are just as special, memorable, and complicated as our beloved heroine, Luz.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: What happens when a determined woman meets a wall of silence? When we're very lucky, and she's very lucky, a writer comes on the scene and becomes An Author. That's the trajectory of Author Fajardo-Anstine. Sabrina & Corina, her literary debut, was a collection of stories and...it went nowhere. It wasn't a flop. It was invisible.

Bemoaning her fate being beneath the bearer of such stories to the world, she got up and made a book tour for herself...got the grassroots interested in the book...and got nominated for a National Book Award. For a debut collection of stories! Grassroots support is crucial, but let's be honest: You gotta have the chops to get anywhere after that.

And here we are, talking about Author Fajardo-Anstine's debut novel, a real gift of a tale about people whose American history goes much deeper than the majority of those reading this blog's history goes. It's not a linear, "in 1868 this unusual thing happened, in 1879 the next unusual thing happened..." narrative strategy. Luz, our literal Woman of Light, is also our PoV character. Everything that happens to her is grounded, contextualized, in her family's...her people's...history. It's a scary thing to think of taking on this much underknown history, and Author Fajardo-Anstine is up to the task. You, the reader, won't get it spoon-fed to you. I won't make it sound like work, or an assignment, but it is not effortless storytime fiction.

That said, the stories are wonderfully deeply told, limned against a background not unfamiliar today. It's not like the USA is racism-free. It's not like it was in earlier times, in that it's still regarded as a more fringe belief than it was in, for example, Luz's 1933 Denver. But the KKK is recrudescing under new names, the old hate gets poured into new bottles and different labels get slapped on them. Make no mistake, it is still less pervasive than the world Luz, her cousin Lizette, her brother the hapless Diego, and company all face every time they open the door.

It's Diego, and David, and frankly all the men in the book, that brought an inevitable fifth star off the rating. I wanted to feel immersed in a time and a place, and was; but the caddish men, not a decent soul among them, made me think "oh, twenty-first century feminism goggles are on, so I (sadly a Y-chromosome bearing person) am in for a drubbing." There are white people who will feel left out, too, but that comes with the story and is, frankly, the point...white folks don't need to be centered, or even there on the periphery, if the author telling the story of a time and place doesn't want them to be. Men, though? She's got those. And does she unload on them. Spineless and useless; abusive and cruel; just flat evil (as anyone who joins the KKK in fact was).

I don't think it was necessary, and it smacks of score-settling. So there went star #5.

Still think it's time to rev up your book club's drinks tray, y'all, and get this terrfic, well-told, challenging, and deeply satisfyingly immersive read on the coffee table.