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4 books match the query 'Galea, Sandro'

cover of Alien: Reflections on Being an Immigrant

Alien

Reflections on Being an Immigrant

Sandro Galea

University of Chicago Press, 2026

A personal treatise from distinguished social scientist Sandro Galea on the indelible effects of being an immigrant—and what it means for the greater good.

“I am one of the lucky ones,” writes Sandro Galea. Galea left home in Malta at fourteen with his parents and sister as the island was rocked by political turmoil. The family made their way to Canada and Galea, in turn, eventually made his way to the United States. This is the story of Galea’s long, surreal journey of forging a life in a series of new and unfamiliar places.

With spare and deeply affecting prose, Alien is a poignant exploration of what it means to build a life across borders—and why it’s important for all of us. Galea’s intimate and personal story frames the experience of being an immigrant in terms of its indelible lessons on adaptation, identity, belonging, and shared generosity. Galea also captures at once the joys and the uncertainties that define the process of uprooting one life to begin another abroad. His is a reflection on empathy, on precarity, and on the effect of immigrating, in which one becomes keenly aware of how quickly life—and the world—can change.

Blending philosophical inquiry and personal story, Alien bridges the gap between storytelling and scholarship and, in doing so, gifts us an essential aperture on the world not everyone experiences—and the value of having those who do.

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cover of Cities and the Health of the Public

Cities and the Health of the Public

Nicholas Freudenberg

Vanderbilt University Press, 2006

The essays commissioned for this book analyze the impact of city living on health, focusing primarily on conditions in the United States. With 16 chapters by 24 internationally recognized experts, the book introduces an ecological approach to the study of the health of urban populations.

This book assesses the primary determinants of well-being in cities, including the social and physical environments, diet, and health care and social services. The book includes chapters on the history of public health in cities, the impact of urban sprawl and urban renewal on health, and the challenges facing cities in the developing world. It also examines conditions such as infectious diseases, violence and disasters, and mental illness.
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cover of Migration and Health

Migration and Health

Edited by Sandro Galea, Catherine K. Ettman, and Muhammad H. Zaman

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A new introduction to a timeless dynamic: how the movement of humans affects health everywhere.

International migrants compose more than three percent of the world’s population, and internal migrants—those migrating within countries—are more than triple that number. Population migration has long been, and remains today, one of the central demographic shifts shaping the world around us. The world’s history—and its health—is shaped and colored by stories of migration patterns, the policies and political events that drive these movements, and narratives of individual migrants. 

Migration and Health offers the most expansive framework to date for understanding and reckoning with human migration’s implications for public health and its determinants. It interrogates this complex relationship by considering not only the welfare of migrants, but also that of the source, destination, and ensuing-generation populations. The result is an elevated, interdisciplinary resource for understanding what is known—and the considerable territory of what is not known—at an intersection that promises to grow in importance and influence as the century unfolds.
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cover of Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time

Within Reason

A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time

Sandro Galea

University of Chicago Press, 2023

A provocative chronicle of how US public health has strayed from its liberal roots.

The Covid-19 response was a crucible of politics and public health—a volatile combination that produced predictably bad results. As scientific expertise became entangled with political motivations, the public-health establishment found itself mired in political encampment.

It was, as Sandro Galea argues, a crisis of liberalism: a retreat from the principles of free speech, open debate, and the pursuit of knowledge through reasoned inquiry that should inform the work of public health.

Across fifty essays, Within Reason chronicles how public health became enmeshed in the insidious social trends that accelerated under Covid-19. Galea challenges this intellectual drift towards intolerance and absolutism while showing how similar regressions from reason undermined social progress during earlier eras. Within Reason builds an incisive case for a return to critical, open inquiry as a guiding principle for the future public health we want—and a future we must work to protect.

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