Precaution, environmental science, and preventive public policy

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James McManus

The author, a hard-living, happily married, middle-aged American, gets a three-day "executive checkup" at the Mayo Clinic and is thereby forced to confront his mortality. He has to survive his own cardiovascular system, inherited habits, and genetic handicaps long enough to see his small children into adulthood. But with so much at stake, and in spite of his terror of death, he may not have the willpower to follow the Mayo clinicians' advice. The book negotiates the political and medical forks in the labyrinth of our health care system and calls for sanity and enlightenment in the stem cell research wars. It's a portrait of the looming mortality of a privileged generation that can't believe the party's winding down, if not over.--From publisher description.

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David B. Resnik

"Environmental Health Ethics illuminates the conflicts between protecting the environment and promoting human health. In this study, David B. Resnik develops a method for making ethical decisions on environmental health issues. He applies this method to various issues, including pesticide use, antibiotic resistance, nutrition policy, vegetarianism, urban development, occupational safety, disaster preparedness, and global climate change. Resnik provides readers with the scientific and technical background necessary to understand these issues. He explains that environmental health controversies cannot simply be reduced to humanity versus environment and explores the ways in which human values and concerns, health, economic development, rights, and justice interact with environmental protection"--Provided by publisher.

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Andrew Pettigrew, Ewan Ferlie, Lorna McKee

In this major analysis of the processes and management of strategic change, Pettigrew, Ferlie and McKee develop a new model centred on receptive and non-receptive contexts for change. Both a powerful analytic device and a broad agenda for management practice, the model outlines key features of internal and external context and action to account for success or failure in change efforts, and for differences in the rate and pace of change. The authors consider the role and impact of such factors as environmental pressures for change; the quality and clarity of change goals and strategies; organizational cultures and inter-organizational relations supportive of change; availability of key people to lead change; and capability in managing change processes - turning 'problems and panics' into sustainable action. Underpinning the model is an extraordinarily rich and multilayered analysis which draws and builds on the authors' research in the British National Health Service during a period of dramatic restructuring. Pettigrew and his colleagues use the case material to look at different ends of strategic change - from strategic response to unanticipated crisis, to rationalization and retrenchment, to major growth and the creation of new organizations. They compare and contrast successful with less successful change efforts. They show how the facilitating factors they identify must interconnect to create the directed energy that shapes effective change. . Shaping Strategic Change will be indispensable reading for managers in private or public sector organizations and for all those studying strategic management, organizational change and public management.

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Katherine A. Dettwyler

One of the most widely used ethnographies published in the last twenty years, this Margaret Mead Award winner has been used as required reading at more than 600 colleges and universities. This personal account by a biocultural anthropologist illuminates not-soon-forgotten messages involving the sobering aspects of fieldwork among malnourished children in West Africa. With nutritional anthropology at its core, Dancing Skeletons presents informal, engaging, and oftentimes dramatic stories that relate the author's experiences conducting research on infant feeding and health in Mali.