This engaging and accessible reader takes a social problems approach to health and medicine, providing a broad and critical lens on contemporary health problems. Designed for courses on social problems and on medical sociology, the volume embraces two fundamental principles: that health and illness are at least partly socially produced, and that health care is not an unfettered good and often brings with it serious social problems. The volume is organized into six sections, addressing the ...

For every television series, the original vision grows within a press of forces-both social and artistic expectations, conventions of the business, as well as conventions of the art. Bad television-predictable, commercial, exploitative-simply yields to the forces. Good television, like the character of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, fights them. Fighting the Forces explores the struggle to create meaning in an impressive example of popular culture, the television series phenomenon Buffy the Vam...

When Amanda Rittenhouse’s new girlfriend, psychiatrist Sara Orlando, convinces her to hire one of her patients to bake a wedding cake, Amanda can’t say no. The fact that the baker is an ex-con doesn’t really worry her until the wedding day arrives.Then during the ceremony the baker disappears, thrusting Amanda and Sara into a twisted web that involves kidnapping, drug trafficking, and murder.Concerned for her patient Tammy, Sara invites Amanda to vacation with her on the Ou...

When unscrupulous Italian prosecutors waged an all-out war in the media and courtroom to wrongly convict American exchange student Amanda Knox for a murder she didn’t commit, family and friends turned to Seattle attorney and media legal analyst Anne Bremner to help win her freedom. The case was dubbed the “trial of the decade” and would coincide with the explosion of social media and a new era of trying cases in public as much as the courtroom. While Italian prosecutors, the press, and onl...