Lifelines

February 1, 2021

A child refugee from China whose parents relied on food stamps, Wen rose to become a health commissioner for Baltimore and president of Planned Parenthood. She's also an emergency care doctor and consultant with the World Health Organization. So when she says "Public health saved your life today--you just don't know it," readers should listen. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 17, 2021
Former Baltimore, Md., health commissioner Wen (coauthor, When Doctors Don’t Listen) combines memoir and advocacy in this stirring call for greater investment in public health programs to combat racism, poverty, gun violence, and other social ills. The daughter of Chinese immigrants who came to the U.S. seeking political asylum, Wen graduated from college and entered medical school at age 18, specializing in emergency medicine because “the ER was the one place where every patient had to be seen and no one would be turned away.” She shares harrowing stories of patients who couldn’t afford their life-saving medications, and describes how a series of misdiagnoses delayed her mother’s cancer treatment. After her mother’s death, Wen helped start a center for “patient-centered care research” at George Washington University and became Baltimore’s health commissioner in 2014. During her tenure, she confronted the city’s opioid crisis by establishing treatment centers and training first responders in administering naloxone. The details of her family’s financial struggles and her tumultuous relationship with her mother add depth to Wen’s career retrospective, and she makes a persuasive case for reorienting the U.S. medical system to prioritize the most vulnerable. Readers will be inspired by Wen’s belief in the power of public health to make America better.

June 15, 2021
A provocative exploration of public health from an immigrant physician and expert's point of view. Wen arrived from China in 1990 at the age of 7. After two pleasant years in small-town Utah, where her mother was studying, the family moved to Los Angeles and fell on difficult times. No jobs existed for someone with her mother's doctorate, and her engineer father had trouble learning English. Consequently, they remained impoverished. Despite their trying circumstances, Wen praises the support system in the U.S.--food stamps, Medicaid, free public education--without which they may not have survived. Once her mother obtained a teaching credential and her father a solid job, the family entered the middle class, allowing Wen to begin the long pursuit of becoming a doctor. Following medical school and study at Oxford after she won a Rhodes scholarship, she began her career advocating for family-centered care. Then she became health commissioner of Baltimore, serving from 2014 to 2018, followed by a year as the head of Planned Parenthood and the arrival of Covid-19, which she calls a "once-in-a-generation public health catastrophe." Wen is at her best describing the years in Baltimore, where her idealism bumped up against politics, necessitating compromise. She writes how officials seemed willing to kill a good program rather than eliminate a single feature, but ultimately, national organizations honored her achievements. Unfortunately, Wen's flexibility didn't work at PP, long attacked by right-wing politicians and pundits for performing abortions (only a minor part of its health services). PP's core supporters wanted a leader as pugnacious as their enemies, and she was forced out. At the dawn of the pandemic, she took up her present position as professor of public health at George Washington University, and even readers familiar with criticisms of the Trump administration's sluggish response will be unsettled by the author's detailed, well-informed condemnation of its aggressive opposition to public health basics as well as anything related to reproductive health care. A moving account of an impressively fruitful life.

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Starred review from July 1, 2021
Don't just dwell on public health problems. Lead with empathy, and do something, says Dr. Wen, and it becomes clear in her remarkable memoir that she follows her own advice. An immigrant from China whose family depended on Medicaid and food stamps, Wen started college at age 13 and medical school at age 18 and became a Rhodes scholar. She explains that she specialized in emergency medicine because she likes its fast-paced, "predictably unpredictable" nature and the way its practitioners treat everyone, including immigrants in fear of deportation and people unable to pay. After serving for four years as Baltimore's health commissioner, she became the first physician in nearly 50 years and the first Asian American to run Planned Parenthood. Wen shares stories about many personal challenges, from having a speech impediment and early-stage cervical cancer to her mother's death from breast cancer, her own postpartum depression, and the bouts with COVID-19 suffered by her husband and their two young children. A public health professor at George Washington University, a columnist for the Washington Post, and a CNN medical analyst, Wen criticizes the Trump administration's piecemeal approach to the pandemic and makes a powerful case for high-quality, universal, affordable health care.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

August 1, 2021

With her latest work, Wen (public health, George Washington Univ.; When Doctors Don't Listen) covers pertinent topics one would expect in a physician's book about public health for lay readers: reproductive health, mother and infant mortality, opiate addiction, the COVID-19 pandemic, and more. The difference between this work and other recent books about public health, however, is Wen's lived experience. She uses anecdotes from her work and her personal life, including her immigration to the United States from China at age seven, to illuminate the chapters. For instance, there's personal context in Wen's discussion of her work as commissioner of Baltimore's health department until 2018. She still lives in Baltimore, where she has been immersed in the city's day-to-day efforts to protect residents during the COVID-19 pandemic, and she explains a public health physician's struggle to balance politicians' wants with public needs. From her own childhood, Wen shares how public health policies helped (or could have helped more) her struggling immigrant family in Los Angeles during times of need. VERDICT Wen's book, combining memoir with a discussion of major public health initiatives, is a refreshing take on the topic, one that addresses racial disparities in health care and recenters the conversation on why society needs public health initiatives, not just an overview of what those initiatives might be. Recommended for readers interested in health policy.--Rachel M. Minkin, Michigan State Univ. Libs., East Lansing

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.