The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has placed a national spotlight on the shameful state of healthcare for America's poor. In the face of this highly publicized disaster, public health experts are more concerned than ever about persistent disparities that result from income and race.

This book tells the story of one groundbreaking approach to medicine that attacks the problem by focusing on the wellness of whole neighborhoods. Since their creation during the 1960s, community health centers have served the needs of the poor in the tenements of New York, the colonias of Texas, the working class neighborhoods of Boston, and the dirt farms of the South. As products of the civil rights movement, the early centers provided not only primary and preventive care, but also social and environmental services, economic development, and empowerment.

Bonnie Lefkowitz-herself a veteran of community health administration-explores the program's unlikely transformation from a small and beleaguered demonstration effort to a network of close to a thousand modern health care organizations serving nearly 15 million people. In a series of personal accounts and interviews with national leaders and dozens of health care workers, patients, and activists in five communities across the United States, she shows how health centers have endured despite cynicism and inertia, the vagaries of politics, and ongoing discrimination.

The third edition of Community Organizing and Community Building for Health and Welfare provides new and more established ways to approach community building and organizing, from collaborating with communities on assessment and issue selection to using the power of coalition building, media advocacy, and social media to enhance the effectiveness of such work.

With a strong emphasis on cultural relevance and humility, this collection offers a wealth of case studies in areas ranging from childhood obesity to immigrant worker rights to health care reform. A "tool kit" of appendixes includes guidelines for assessing coalition effectiveness, exercises for critical reflection on our own power and privilege, and training tools such as "policy bingo." From former organizer and now President Barack Obama to academics and professionals in the fields of public health, social work, urban planning, and community psychology, the book offers a comprehensive vision and on-the-ground examples of the many ways community building and organizing can help us address some of the most intractable health and social problems of our times.

Dr. Minkler's course syllabus: Although Dr. Minkler has changed the order of some chapters in the syllabus to accommodate guest speakers and help students prep for the midterm assignment she uses, she arranged the actual book layout in a way that should flow quite naturally if instructors wish to use it in the order in which chapters appear.

Today's physicians are medical scientists, drilled in the basics of physiology, anatomy, genetics, and chemistry. They learn how to crunch data, interpret scans, and see the human form as a set of separate organs and systems in some stage of disease. Missing from their training is a holistic portrait of the patient as a person and as a member of a community. Yet a humanistic passion and desire to help people often are the attributes that compel a student toward a career in medicine. So what happens along the way to tarnish that idealism? Can a new approach to medical education make a difference?

Doctors Serving People is just such a prescriptive. While a professor at Rush Medical College in Chicago, Edward J. Eckenfels helped initiate and direct a student-driven program in which student doctors worked in the poor, urban communities during medical school, voluntarily and without academic credit. In addition to their core curriculum and clinical rotations, students served the social and health needs of diverse and disadvantaged populations. Now more than ten years old, the program serves as an example for other medical schools throughout the country. Its story provides a working model of how to reform medical education in America.

Throughout the “New South,” relationships based on race, class, social status, gender, and citizenship are being upended by the recent influx of Latina/o residents. Doing Good examines these issues as they play out in the microcosm of a community health center in North Carolina that previously had served mostly African American clients but now serves predominantly Latina/o clients. Drawing on eighteen months of experience as a participant- observer in the clinic and in-depth interviews with clinic staff at all levels, Natalia Deeb-Sossa provides an informative and fascinating view of how changing demographics are profoundly affecting the new social order.

Deeb-Sossa argues persuasively that “moral identities” have been constructed by clinic staff. The high-status staff—nearly all of whom are white—see themselves as heroic workers. Mid- and lower-status Latina staff feel like they are guardians of people who are especially needy and deserving of protection. In contrast, the moral identity of African American staffers had previously been established in response to serving “their people.” Their response to the evolving clientele has been to create a self-image of superiority by characterizing Latina/o clients as “immoral,” “lazy,” “working the system,” having no regard for rules or discipline, and being irresponsible parents.

All of the health-care workers want to be seen as “doing good.” But they fail to see how, in constructing and maintaining their own moral identity in response to their personal views and stereotypes, they have come to treat each other and their clients in ways that contradict their ideals.

In the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, New York City was struck like no other. By the early nineties, it was struggling with more known cases than the next forty most infected cities, including San Francisco, combined.

Fighting for Our Lives is the first comprehensive social history of New York's AIDS community-a diverse array of people that included not only gay men, but also African Americans, Haitians, Latinos, intravenous drug users, substance abuse professionals, elite supporters, and researchers. Looking back over twenty-five years, Susan Chambré focuses on the ways that these disparate groups formed networks of people and organizations that-both together and separately-supported persons with AIDS, reduced transmission, funded research, and in the process, gave a face to an epidemic that for many years, whether because of indifference, homophobia, or inefficiency, received little attention from government or health care professionals.

Beyond the limits of New York City, and even AIDS, this case study also shows how any epidemic provides a context for observing how societies respond to events that expose the inadequacies of their existing social and institutional arrangements. By drawing attention to the major faults of New York's (and America's) response to a major social and health crisis at the end of the twentieth century, the book urges more effective and sensitive actions-both governmental and civil-in the future.

Incorporating investigative journalism and drawing on interviews with participants and leaders, Sandy Smith-Nonini examines the contested place of health and development in El Salvador over the last two decades. Healing the Body Politic recounts the dramatic story of radical health activism from its origins in liberation theology and guerrilla medicine during the third-world country's twelve-year civil war, through development of a remarkable "popular health system," administered by lay providers in a former war zone controlled by leftist rebels. This ethnography casts light on the conflicts between the conservative Ministry of Health and primary health advocates during the 1990s peace process--a time when the government sought to dismantle the effective peasant-run rural system. It offers a rare analysis of the White Marches of 2002û2003, when radicalized physicians rose to national leadership in a successful campaign against privatization of the social security health system. Healing the Body Politic contributes to the productive integration of medical and political anthropology by bringing the semiotics of health and the body to bear on cultural understandings of warfare, the state, and globalization.

Thomas P. Weil believes that the formation of health networks, or integrated delivery systems, represents a more sophisticated attempt to restructure America's health system than those previously undertaken. He argues that this is so because integrated delivery systems require the application of established business principles and well-researched clinical acumen to the delivery of medical care services. This book evaluates whether recently formed health networks can generate enough fiscal savings to provide greater access to and quality of health care despite the current trend of cutbacks in reimbursement from Medicare and managed care plans.
Unfortunately, most hospitals that have formed alliances with a previous competitor or nearby teaching facility have found that they are not yet achieving the savings originally forecast. Weil finds that these shortcomings often have been caused by the difficulties in achieving a strategic fit between two partners, in finding a middle ground when differences in culture and values surface, and in implementing operational efficiencies. The book concludes with a discussion of a number of ways in which networks might cut costs in the future.
Health Networks will be of interest to medical practitioners and administrators, as well as to students in health services management programs.
Thomas P. Weil is President, Bedford Health Associates, Inc., management consultants for health and hospital services.

When Bechara Choucair was a young doctor, he learned an important lesson: treating a patient for hypothermia does little good if she has to spend the next night out in the freezing cold. As health commissioner of Chicago, he was determined to address the societal causes of disease and focus the city’s resources on its most vulnerable populations. That targeted approach has led to dramatic successes, such as lowering rates of smoking, teen pregnancy, breast cancer mortalities, and other serious ills.

In Precision Community Health, Choucair shows how those successes can be replicated and expanded around the country. The key is to use advanced technologies to identify which populations are most at risk for specific health threats and avert crises before they begin. Big data makes precision community health possible. But in our increasingly complex world, we also need new strategies for developing effective coalitions, media campaigns, and policies. This book showcases four innovations that move public health departments away from simply dispensing medical care and toward supporting communities to achieve true well-being.

The approach Choucair pioneered in Chicago requires broadening our thinking about what constitutes public health. It is not simply about access to a doctor, but access to decent housing, jobs, parks, food, and social support. It also means acknowledging that a one-size-fits-all strategy may exacerbate inequities. By focusing on those most in need, we create an agenda that is simultaneously more impactful and more achievable. The result is a wholesale change in the way public health is practiced and in the well-being of all our communities.