Terrorism and Public Health: A Balanced Approach to Strengthening Systems and Protecting People; In the Wake of Terror: Medicine and Morality in a Time of Crisis

Terrorism and Public Health: A Balanced Approach to Strengthening Systems and Protecting People

Eds Barry S Levy, Victor W Sidel

Oxford University Press, £35, pp 377

ISBN 0 19 515834 2

In the Wake of Terror: Medicine and Morality in a Time of Crisis

Ed Jonathan D Moreno

The MIT Press, £16.50, pp 229

ISBN 0 262 13428 4

http://mitpress.mit.edu

Rating: ;

Reading Terrorism and Public Health is like listening to a psychotic patient—florid delusion interspersed with some remarkably lucid episodes. To its credit, this book clearly sets out its political orientation in the first chapter. It defines public health as “what we, as a society, do collectively to assure the conditions in which people can be healthy.” Readers who expect to find any reference to US state terrorism in Nicaragua—for which the United States was condemned by the World Court—or the Clinton administration's bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan will be disappointed. The “society” in the definition is unashamedly US. This is a book about terrorism directed at the United States rather than terrorism directed by the United States.

Rescue …