Books like Haiti after the earthquake by Paul Farmer

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks follows the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells were taken in 1951 without her consent and later became the first immortal human cell line, HeLa, driving major scientific breakthroughs while raising questions of ethics, race, and medical exploitation.

Paul Farmer, a Harvard doctor and anthropologist, commits to eradicating infectious disease in the developing world through the charity Partners in Health.

This book tells the truth about uncomfortable matters, uncomfortable, that is, for the structures of power and the doctrinal framework that protects them from critical scrutiny. It tells the truth about what has been happening in Haiti, and the U.S. role in its bitter fate.

Published to glowing reviews, The Big Truck That Went By is a crucial look at a signal failure of international aid. Jonathan M. Katz was the only full-time American news correspondent in Haiti on January 12, 2010, when the deadliest earthquake in the history of the Western Hemisphere struck the island nation. In this visceral first-hand account, Katz takes readers inside the terror of that day, the devastation visited on ordinary Haitians, and through the monumental--yet misbegotten--rescue effort that followed. More than half of American adults gave money for Haiti, part of a global response totaling $16.3 billion in pledges. But four years later the effort has foundered. Its most important promises-to rebuild safer cities, alleviate severe poverty, and strengthen Haiti to face future disasters-remain unfulfilled. How did so much generosity amount to so little? What went wrong? In what a Miami Herald Op-Ed called "the most important written work to emerge from the rubble," Katz follows the money to uncover startling truths about how good intentions go wrong, and what can be done to make aid "smarter." Reporting alongside Bill Clinton, Wyclef Jean, Sean Penn, and Haiti's leaders and people, Katz creates a complex, darkly funny, and unexpected portrait of one of the world's most fascinating countries. The Big Truck That Went By is not only a definitive account of Haiti's earthquake, but of the world we live in today.

"Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of life - and death - in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. 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 times. With passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other."--BOOK JACKET.