Phil Brown

From the author of Travels with My Angst and Any Guru Will Do, a vivid, nostalgic, and funny memoir of growing up in Hong Kong in the 1960s. Phil Brown's life begins in small town Australia — Maitland, NSW to be precise — but in 1963 his father Ted hankers to return to the Hong Kong of his childhood and to cash in on a construction boom in the burgeoning colony. Then under British rule, the world of Hong Kong is a truly fascinating place for gweilos or foreigners, both a colonial outpost and a region redolent with all the exoticism and contradictions of the Far East. The Brown’s home, in the garden suburb of Kowloon Tong, buzzes with characters: the family's amah, Ah Moy, frequent visitors such as the inscrutable Mr Lai, the spy-like Tony Parr, and family members such as Uncle Cyril. Not to mention the kid from across the road, Michael Hutchence.

A Hong Kong Childhood

The Kowloon Kid

The increase in environmentally induced diseases and the loosening of regulation and safety measures have inspired a massive challenge to established ways of looking at health and the environment. Communities with disease clusters, women facing a growing breast cancer incidence rate, and people of color concerned about the asthma epidemic have become critical of biomedical models that emphasize the role of genetic makeup and individual lifestyle practices. Likewise, scientists have lost patience with their colleagues' and government's failure to adequately address environmental health issues and to safeguard research from corporate manipulation. Focusing specifically on breast cancer, asthma, and Gulf War-related health conditions-"contested illnesses" that have generated intense debate in the medical and political communities-Phil Brown shows how these concerns have launched an environmental health movement that has revolutionized scientific thinking and policy. Before the last three decades of widespread activism regarding toxic exposures, people had little opportunity to get information. Few sympathetic professionals were available, the scientific knowledge base was weak, government agencies were largely unprepared, laypeople were not considered bearers of useful knowledge, and ordinary people lacked their own resources for discovery and action. Brown argues that organized social movements are crucial in recognizing and acting to combat environmental diseases. His book draws on environmental and medical sociology, environmental justice, environmental health science, and social movement studies to show how citizen-science alliances have fought to overturn dominant epidemiological paradigms. His probing look at the ways scientific findings are made available to the public and the changing nature of policy offers a new perspective on health and the environment and the relationship among people, knowledge, power, and authority.

Contested Illnesses and the Environmental Health Movement

Toxic Exposures

Stephen Zavestoski

This book represents the first collection of research on health social movements. Demonstrates that health social movements are an innovative and powerful form of political action. Brings together the study of health and illness with social movement theory in order to establish a basis for the study of health social movements. Covers disease-based movements focused on diseases such as Alzheimer’s and breast cancer. Also addresses issue-based movements such as the pro-choice movement, the movement for complementary and alternative medicine, and movements around stem cell research. Illustrates the value of interdisciplinary approaches to studying health social movements.

Social Movements in Health

Rachel Morello-Frosch

The politics and science of health and disease remain contested terrain among scientists, health practitioners, policy makers, industry, communities, and the public. Stakeholders in disputes about illnesses or conditions disagree over their fundamental causes as well as how they should be treated and prevented. This thought-provoking book crosses disciplinary boundaries by engaging with both public health policy and social science, asserting that science, activism, and policy are not separate issues and showing how the contribution of environmental factors in disease is often overlooked.

Citizens, Science, and Health Social Movements

Contested Illnesses

With selections from Isaac Bashevis Singer, Allegra Goodman, Moss Hart, TaniaGrossinger, and many others, this volume is a tribute to the legendary Jewishresort area of the Catskills. 40 halftones. 26 figures.

A Century of Jewish Experience in the Mountains

In the Catskills

Steve Kroll-Smith

In myriad ways, humans have gradually tailored their world to meet immediate material needs. In so doing, we have, in the minds of many, systematically altered a formerly hospitable environment into one more ambiguous in its effect on the human organism. Just as environments have adapted in response to human activity, so too is the human body now, in turn, forced to adapt to these altered conditions. Today, mysterious illnesses, from chronic fatigue to Gulf War Syndrome, meet us at every turn. Yet even as an increasing number of people attribute ailments to environmental problems, the suspected relationships between illness and environment remain unclear. Illness and the Environment examines how sick people and their allies struggle to achieve public recognition of somatic complaints and disabilities that they contend are related to "manufactured environments." The first of its kind, the anthology considers the political, legal, and medical conflicts arising from these illnesses, and will prove invaluable to researchers, scholars, public policy makers, trial attorneys, and activist organizations.

A Reader in Contested Medicine

Illness and the Environment

Edwin J. Mikkelsen

"An excellent and readable account of the toxic waste crisis in Woburn, Massachusetts, and the courageous efforts by local citizens to protect their community. The Woburn story is an inspiring lesson for citizens across the country struggling to protect the environment from polluters and unresponsive government officials."—Senator Edward Kennedy

Toxic Waste, Leukemia, and Community Action

No Safe Place

Journalist-about-town Phil Brown has travelled widely but always reluctantly. Whether pursuing a tailor-made suit in the back alleys of Hong Kong, souvenir hunting in Ubud or dodging potholes on the road to Kathmandu, he shoulders a veritable kitbag of travel phobias.With his more adventurous wife Sandra, Phil worries his way around the world, seeking the comfort of cable TV and 24-hour room service. Against his better judgment, he tackles the rainswept peaks of Scotland, the icy alienation of the Rockies and even the high Himalayas.Fear not - Travels with My Angst is the perfect travelling companion.

Phil Brown

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