• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2021 August #1
  *Starred Review* Inflammation is everywhere, physician, activist, and cofounder of Do No Harm Coalition Marya and best-selling author Patel maintain. The planet is inflamed and so are our individual bodies. It took the COVID pandemic to expose "the combustible injustices of systemic racism and global capitalism," they write. More ominously, they conclude, "The world has been organized to burn." This doleful opinion is evidenced by such symptoms as record-breaking global temperatures and raging wildfires. As they explore the many aspects of inflammation, Marya and Patel use the body as a useful analogy, given its immune, circulatory, digestive, respiratory, reproductive, endocrine, and nervous systems. As they note, inflammation isn't a disease but rather a sign "of a larger problem." That is what they attempt to unpack by exploring the daily traumas of biased law enforcement, acute poverty, hunger, discrimination, forced displacement, and exposure to toxins. As they note, not all patients are equal. Inspired by the work of Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault, among others, the authors examine the "myriad ways" systemic injustice impacts mind and body under the stress of eugenics, exposure to various kinds of trauma, and medical dehumanization. This is a powerful, knowledgeable, and important work about the dangerous connection between health and societal injustices and how it can be resolved. Copyright 2021 Booklist Reviews.

Dr. Rupa Marya is a physician, an activist, a mother, and a composer. She is an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where she practices and teaches internal medicine. She is a cofounder of the Do No Harm Coalition, a collective of health workers committed to addressing disease through structural change. At the invitation of Lakhóta health leaders, she is helping to set up the Mni Wiconi Clinic and Farm at Standing Rock to decolonize medicine and food. She is a cofounder of the Deep Medicine Circle, an organization committed to healing the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, story, and learning. Working with her husband, the agroecological farmer Benjamin Fahrer, and the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone, she is a part of the Farming Is Medicine project, where farmers are recast as ecological stewards of rematriated land and food is liberated from the market economy. She has toured twenty-nine countries with her band, Rupa and the April Fishes, whose music was described by the legend Gil Scott-Heron as “Liberation Music.”

Raj Patel is a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, a professor in the university’s department of nutrition, and a research associate at Rhodes University, South Africa. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved and the New York Times bestselling The Value of Nothing, and the coauthor of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. A James Beard Foundation Leadership Award winner, he is the codirector of a groundbreaking documentary on climate change and the global food system, The Ants and the Grasshopper. He serves on the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and has advised governments worldwide on the causes of and solutions to crises of sustainability.