What Tufts authors are writing about

Awakening Hippocrates: A Primer on Health, Poverty and Global Service and A Practical Guide to Global Health Service
American Medical Association, 2006
Dr. Edward J. O’Neil, assistant professor of emergency medicine at the School of Medicine

These two books answer the basic but important questions: Why do we have such poverty and health inequality in a time of medical miracles, and what can individuals do about it? Awakening Hippocrates profiles seven exemplary health-care providers, including Albert Schweitzer, Tom Dooley and Paul Farmer. A Practical Guide offers step-by-step instructions on how anyone can serve in poor regions in the United States and abroad and includes a database of more than 300 organizations looking for volunteers. Go to www.omnimed.org for more information.

A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science and Ethics
Columbia University Press, 2006
Dr. Paul Waldau, director of the Center for Animals and Public Policy at the Cummings School, and Kimberley Patton, Harvard University, editors

A jacket quote by J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, describes the book as “an outstanding collection, ranging over most aspects of the lives of animals in the human world. The essays on the place of animals in religious traditions are particularly authoritative, but all the contributions are thoughtful, well-informed and enlightening.”

Insurgents, Terrorists and Militias: The Warriors of Contemporary Combat
Columbia University Press, 2006
Richard H. Shultz Jr., professor and director of the International Security Studies Program, Fletcher School, and Andrea J. Dew, F03, Ph.D. student, Fletcher School

Failing to understand the changed nature of warfare can lead to deadly consequences, as the Iraq insurgency shows, the authors write. Looking at post-1990 conflicts in Somalia, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Iraq, “in which the armies of modern nation-states fought armed groups, often with great difficulty, in traditional societal settings,” Shultz and Dew propose new taxonomies, describe the reasons non-government combatants wage war and the nontraditional approaches those combatants use. Government strategists hoping to defeat these non-state warriors must learn about the cultures and traditions of those groups rather than relying solely on how much firepower they possess, the authors argue.

The Navajo People and Uranium Mining
University of New Mexico Press, 2006
Doug Brugge, associate professor of public health and family medicine at the School of Medicine, co-editor

This book reflects Brugge’s long engagement with the legacy of uranium mining on Navajo reservations out West. The other editors are Timothy Benally, a Navajo and retired director of the Office of Navajo Uranium Workers, and Esther Yazzie-Lewis, also a Navajo, who recently completed a master’s degree in American studies at the University of New Mexico. The book charts decades of neglect dating from World War II, when the hazards of uranium exposure on the part of miners and their families were brushed aside in a race to build atomic bombs. “This book is the documented history of how these Navajo people lived, how they worked, and now, sadly, how they died waiting for compassionate federal compensation for laboring in the most hazardous conditions imaginable, and which were known at the time yet concealed from them,” writes Joe Shirley Jr., president of the Navajo Nation. “These Navajo miners and their families became, in essence, expendable people.”