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This book is a candid account of a trauma surgical team based, for a tour of duty, at a field hospital in Helmand, Afghanistan. It tells of the highs and lows of surgical life in hard-hitting detail, bringing to life a morally ambiguous world in which good people face impossible choices and in which routines designed to normalize experience have the unintended effect of highlighting war's absurdity. With stories that are at once comical and tragic, the book captures the surreal experience of being a doctor at war. It lifts the cover on a world rarely ever seen, let alone written about, and provides a poignant counterpoint to the archetypical, adrenaline-packed, macho tale of what it is like to go to war. Here the crude and visceral coexist with the tender and affectionate. The book tells of well-meaning soldiers at hospital reception, there to deliver a pair of legs in the belief that these can be reattached to their comrade, now in mid-surgery; of midsummer Christmas parties and pancake breakfasts and late-night sauna sessions; of interpersonal rivalries and banter; of caring too little or too much; of tenderness and compassion fatigue; of hell and redemption; of heroism and of playing God. This is one of the first books ever to bring to life the experience of the doctors and surgical teams tasked with mending what war destroys.

Millions of people around the world face a real problem: their desperate need for affordable medicines clashes with the core business model of the powerful pharmaceutical industry. In response, patients and activists are aiming to make all essential medicines affordable by reclaiming medicines as a public good and a human right, instead of a profit-making commodity. Their challenge is made more daunting by the perceived complexity of the issues surrounding access to essential medicines. “The problem we have is that there are only a handful of people in the world who know what we are taking about,” one leading medicine activist admits. It doesn’t have to be this way. A Prescription for Change diagnoses our medicines problem and prescribes the cure: it delivers a clear and convincing argument for a complete shift in the global and U.S. approach to developing and providing essential medicines—and a primer on how to make that change happen.

Rethinking Diabetes investigates how "global" and "local" factors transform how diabetes is perceived, experienced, and embodied from place to place. The book argues that neoliberal capitalism fuels the intrinsic links between hunger and crisis, structural violence and fear, and cumulative trauma and psychiatric distress that are embodied in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (hereafter, "diabetes"). It suggests that a global story of modernization as the primary force in the spread of global diabetes overlooks the micro-level stressors that respond to structural inequalities and drive the underlying psychophysiological processes linking hunger, crisis, oppression, unbridled stress, and chronic psychological distress to diabetes. The narratives in this book unveil how deeply embedded such factors are in how diabetes is experienced and (re)produced among low-income communities around the world. Yet, the book focuses on four life stories – one from each context – to consider how diabetes is perceived and experienced in the United States, India, South Africa, and Kenya. These discrete chapters investigate how social, cultural, and epidemiological factors shape people's experiences and why we need to take these differences seriously when we think about what drives diabetes and how it affects the lives of the poor.