Expanding the Book and Media Section to Novels and Children’s Books

The AJPH Book & Media section includes discussions of books, of course, but also music^1,2 and movies.³ It is now also open to novels and children’s books.

The two novels reviewed in this issue are about migrants who were uprooted from the land of their parents and from their culture. Where the Line Is Drawn: A Tale of Crossings, Friendships, and Fifty Years of Occupation in Israel-Palestine is by a Palestinian author, Raja Shehadeh, and The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping: A Novel is by an Israeli author, Aharon Appelfeld. At some point, both authors lived a few miles away from each other, one in Ramallah, Palestine, and the other in Petah Tikva, Israel, near Tel Aviv. They had two different life experiences, but their migration perspectives and styles are astonishingly similar.

Both novels are about the struggles of the uprooted to maintain their humanity and their identity. Shehadeh is infused with an Arab culture that is older than Israel, whereas Appelfeld remains in contact with his parent’s pre–WWII Eastern European culture through his dreams. Both authors had to learn Hebrew. Their novels are written like personal diaries, in a direct, simple, and sometimes journalistic style. I am grateful to McNeely (p. 11) and Clarfield (p. 10), who had already written about access to care for Palestinians in Israel,^4,5 to review novels that tell us about the feelings of Palestinians and Israelis.

Novels can help us to understand another person’s perspective. Strikingly, Kenya Brown’s Summer Time Blues, reviewed by D’Agostino in this issue of AJPH (p. 12), does the same thing. When the usually radiant Kenya becomes somber and sad amid her cheering schoolmates when the teacher asks, “What do you plan to do this summer?,” no one seems to understand, not even the teacher, that summer meant that Kenya would be stuck in her apartment watching television, because her single working mother could not afford vacations. Like Eddie Cochran and Jerry Capehart before her, Kenya believes that “there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues” (bit.ly/1ly5Xym). Kenya will, however, find the cure in herself and transform the traumatic experience that affects her health and that of her siblings in a way that should resonate with all girls and boys.

We hope that the newly expanded Book and Media section will show that novels and children’s books can shed light on aspects of public health that the scientific literature cannot describe as richly. Science is what makes public health an effective discipline. However, despite differences in values and opinions, people in public health share a vision of a society that is fair and healthy. They share a culture. Literature and art help us to understand how people feel and live and to visualize what our society is and what it could be.