This is a commendably reflective work of sociology that, more importantly, tells a remarkable history of care.
(
Publishers Weekly)
A remarkable story of healing, conflict and the journey of an organization once dismissed as a bunch of 'medical commandos,' which has gone from being perceived as just another product of the turbulent 1960s to winning the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize to becoming one of the most important health care humanitarian organizations in the world.
(Emily Friedman
Hospitals and Health Networks)
As one of the world’s most insightful and pathbreaking sociologists, Renée Fox has brilliantly captured the historic and contemporary essence of the MSF movement, and most especially its defining questions, characters, and living dilemmas. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand humanitarian action in the twenty-first century.
(James Orbinski, MSF International Council President 1998-2001, and Research Chair in Global Health, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Professor of Medicine, University of Toronto)
Long awaited, Renée Fox’s study of Doctors Without Borders is an insightful and generous ethnographic account of the Nobel laureate organization, not eluding the dilemmas, quandaries, tensions and contradictions at the heart of the noble but uncertain task of saving lives and advocating for victims.
(Didier Fassin, author of
Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present)
The last forty years have seen an extraordinary rise in humanitarian assistance to those suffering in conflict and emergencies. Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) has been at the centre of this, one of the world’s most admired organisations, yet one constantly seeking to reinvent itself. In this book Renée Fox at once tells the story of MSF, offers a brilliant sociological study of organisational character and change, and analyses the challenges MSF faces working in settings as diverse as Russia and South Africa. This is a book well worth reading.
(Craig Calhoun, Director and President, London School of Economics and Political Science)
An extraordinarily insightful study of an extraordinary organization. Renée Fox, one of our country's most distinguished and thoughtful students of medicine, has captured the motives and achievements, as well as the characteristic tensions, of an organization ministering to the sick and dispossessed from Siberia to Cape Town, providing care and bearing witness. Doctors Without Borders contributes significantly to the history and ethnography of social movements—as well as to our understanding of the challenges implicit in shaping moral action in a diversely dismaying world. It deserves to be widely read and enthusiastically reviewed.
(Charles E. Rosenberg, Professor of the History of Science and the Ernest E. Monrad Professor in the Social Sciences, Harvard University)
Generally interested readers will Find Fox's thoughtful and thought-provoking overview ambitious and well worth the effort, while anyone focused on health care and medicine will be deeply fascinated.
(Donna Chavez
Booklist)
Doctors Without Borders by Renee C. Fox is interesting and inspiring. Very well done!
(Professor Peter Piot, Director London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine)