Recommended Publications

Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor

By Paul Farmer, Amartya Sen

In this book, Paul Farmer tries to answer the question: What is public health? With personal accounts and experiences as a physician traveling to developing countries, he looks at public health not only from a medical, but ethical and social perspective. This book questions the responsibility of proper health care and its availability for all citizens and how systems and agencies, not only on a local, but global level fail to provide this basic need as a human right. Aside from the data that is provided, this book illustrates case study accounts of systems and their failures to provide adequate health care. For Paul Farmer, public health is not independent of the different factors that evolve and take place in society. The interdependence of variables such as economics, socio-economic status, culture and economics in society must work together to provide the proper type of health care to all individuals.

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GLOBAL WOMAN: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy

Edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild

This book not only gives documented information on the global domestic worker industry, but depicts written accounts of women’s lives in this field of work. Global Woman has interwoven the subject of human, women’s and worker’s rights into an elaborate collaboration of personal depictions, factual information and thought provoking stories. In a world that is at times categorized between the status of the rich and poor and the have’s and have-nots, the vivid reality of women’s lives in this book portrays the ferverant challenges and grueling choices that must be made to sustain not only one’s life, but at most common, the life of the family as well. The social and economic pressures that overwhelm women to migrate as domestic workers do not pave the opportunity towards hope and a better life. What is illustrated in this book is the reality of the exploitation of domestic workers and the lack of support that is needed along with a checks-and-balance system to fight what can at times be viewed as modern day slavery.

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