Pathologies of power : health, human rights, and the new war on the poor

Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience working in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world's poor is the most important human rights struggle of our time.

In Pathologies of Power Farmer uses harrowing stories of life - and death - in extreme situations to link the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence.

Yet this book is far from a hopeless inventory of abuse.

Farmer's disturbing examples are linked to a guarded optimism that new medical and social technologies will develop in tandem with a more informed sense of social justice.