Mercy Kafotokoza: How Nurses are Revolutionizing Community Health in Rural Africa

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee is an overview and rough timeline of the fight against cancer. The book’s subtitle, A Biography of Cancer, reflects Mukherjee’s feeling that cancer is a living and evolving entity that fought modern medicine to a stalemate for centuries. Mukherjee, a doctor and biologist specializing in immunology (the study of the immune system) and oncology (the study of cancer), has spent much of his career on the front line of that fight. Though the book was first published in 2010, cancer remains a frightening disease that doctors are still working to understand and treat.

Our guide provides context and background information for Mukherjee’s book, helping you to understand the more technical aspects of cancer and cancer treatment, as well as the significance behind major events in the fight against cancer.

Paul Farmer has worked for decades to provide health care to patients in Haiti and around the world. A doctor and anthropologist by training, Farmer saw the health of a nation’s people as a product of its culture and political history. For Haiti, centuries of political strife—often at the hands of imperialist powers—had left it one of the most impoverished countries in the western hemisphere.

Despite prevailing wisdom that it was too costly to treat patients in poor countries for diseases like drug-resistant tuberculosis and AIDS, Farmer strived to treat everyone who needed care. His multi-pronged approach included prioritizing preventive services, changing international healthcare policy, and lowering the cost of important drugs. His organization’s approach is considered a model for providing treatment to patients in poor countries.

In Being Mortal, surgeon Atul Gawande considers our experience of aging and dying in the 21st century. In his view, the modern approach to these stages of life undermines our ability to live well up to the end—to do better, we need to accept death as a natural part of the human experience and prioritize the well-being of the dying.

Critics praised Being Mortal and considered it one of the best books of 2014. It’s since been adapted into a TV documentary and a feature film.

We’ve divided our guide into two main sections to explore Gawande’s theme. The first section examines some of the ways we approach aging and death in our modern era, and the second explores Gawande’s ideas about how we might improve our experience of these profoundly important aspects of life.

In our commentary, we’ve contextualized Gawande’s ideas by citing relevant statistics about end-of-life care in the modern healthcare system and by exploring psychological insights on how we experience our mortality.

Millions of people throughout the world live on less than 99 cents a day. MIT professors Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for their efforts to study the causes of such poverty—Poor Economics demonstrates their unique approach.

They analyze poverty by asking small, pointed questions about specific aspects of the lives of the poor. Their goal is to develop a detailed picture of how the poor live and how policy interventions affect their lives so that policymakers can better design interventions that help them. Since publishing Poor Economics in 2011, their approach has come to dominate the field.

In our guide, we’ll see what the authors discover when they closely examine the lives of the world’s poorest people. Along the way, we’ll note critiques of their approach and share relevant updates on the current status of global poverty.

Paul Farmer has worked for decades to provide health care to patients in Haiti and around the world. A doctor and anthropologist by training, Farmer saw the health of a nation’s people as a product of its culture and political history. For Haiti, centuries of political strife—often at the hands of imperialist powers—had left it one of the most impoverished countries in the western hemisphere.

Despite prevailing wisdom that it was too costly to treat patients in poor countries for diseases like drug-resistant tuberculosis and AIDS, Farmer strived to treat everyone who needed care. His multi-pronged approach included prioritizing preventive services, changing international healthcare policy, and lowering the cost of important drugs. His organization’s approach is considered a model for providing treatment to patients in poor countries.

Why is tuberculosis—a completely curable disease—still killing over 1.6 million people annually? In Everything Is Tuberculosis, best-selling novelist and YouTube educator John Green confronts this troubling paradox, revealing how social inequality, stigma, and systemic failures allow a preventable tragedy to continue. After meeting a teenage TB patient in Sierra Leone, Green embarked on a mission to understand and combat humanity’s deadliest infectious disease.

Our guide distills Green’s exploration of TB’s scientific, historical, and social dimensions into a framework for understanding this global crisis. We discuss his insights into how TB persists along lines of poverty and power, and how a combination of medical innovation, social change, and political will could end the epidemic. We also connect Green’s ideas to sources of hope—from fungi in peat bogs that could yield new antibiotics to lessons from Black medical justice movements—providing other perspectives on how we might respond to this ancient disease.

Paul Farmer has worked for decades to provide health care to patients in Haiti and around the world. A doctor and anthropologist by training, Farmer saw the health of a nation’s people as a product of its culture and political history. For Haiti, centuries of political strife—often at the hands of imperialist powers—had left it one of the most impoverished countries in the western hemisphere.

Despite prevailing wisdom that it was too costly to treat patients in poor countries for diseases like drug-resistant tuberculosis and AIDS, Farmer strived to treat everyone who needed care. His multi-pronged approach included prioritizing preventive services, changing international healthcare policy, and lowering the cost of important drugs. His organization’s approach is considered a model for providing treatment to patients in poor countries.

In Being Mortal, surgeon Atul Gawande considers our experience of aging and dying in the 21st century. In his view, the modern approach to these stages of life undermines our ability to live well up to the end—to do better, we need to accept death as a natural part of the human experience and prioritize the well-being of the dying.

Critics praised Being Mortal and considered it one of the best books of 2014. It’s since been adapted into a TV documentary and a feature film.

We’ve divided our guide into two main sections to explore Gawande’s theme. The first section examines some of the ways we approach aging and death in our modern era, and the second explores Gawande’s ideas about how we might improve our experience of these profoundly important aspects of life.

In our commentary, we’ve contextualized Gawande’s ideas by citing relevant statistics about end-of-life care in the modern healthcare system and by exploring psychological insights on how we experience our mortality.

Paul Farmer has worked for decades to provide health care to patients in Haiti and around the world. A doctor and anthropologist by training, Farmer saw the health of a nation’s people as a product of its culture and political history. For Haiti, centuries of political strife—often at the hands of imperialist powers—had left it one of the most impoverished countries in the western hemisphere.

Despite prevailing wisdom that it was too costly to treat patients in poor countries for diseases like drug-resistant tuberculosis and AIDS, Farmer strived to treat everyone who needed care. His multi-pronged approach included prioritizing preventive services, changing international healthcare policy, and lowering the cost of important drugs. His organization’s approach is considered a model for providing treatment to patients in poor countries.

In Development as Freedom, Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen calls for a radical rethinking of the way we view poverty and economic development. Pulling from more than five decades of his own research, Sen argues that economic development goes beyond increasing wealth—it’s about expanding freedom.

In this guide, we examine the five types of freedom that Sen argues are integral to development. We explore how empowering women helps communities, how democracy prevents famine, and how capitalist values lead to the greater good.

This guide explains Sen’s reasoning—from what it means to be poor to his idea of justice and the role that markets play in development. Additionally, we examine different perspectives on the substance and practicality of Sen’s “development as freedom” approach.

In the 21st century, we can do extraordinary things: We can predict dangerous storms, explore distant planets, and save people from life-threatening conditions and injuries. Yet highly trained, experienced, and capable people regularly make avoidable mistakes.

In The Checklist Manifesto, Boston surgeon Atul Gawande contends the reason is that knowledge and complexity in many fields have exceeded the capacity of any individual to get everything right. Under pressure, we make simple mistakes and overlook the obvious. Drawing lessons from spectacular successes and failures in recent years, he argues that the solution is a checklist. The book builds the case for checklists and issues a plea for adopting this backstop to human fallibility.

Lean In, by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, explores the professional, personal and societal hurdles holding women back from leadership positions in the workforce. The hurdles include discrimination, family-unfriendly policies, and a lack of help at home. To get more women into leadership positions and make true changes, Sandberg urges women to “lean in” to their careers, taking risks and being ambitious in their professional goals, while demanding more help at home. To do this, women must fight a lack of self-confidence and internalized gender stereotypes to forge fulfilling and rewarding personal and professional lives.