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Book Review
| Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History. By JAMES C. RILEY. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 256 pp. $50.00 (cloth); $18.00 (paper).
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James C. Riley, Distinguished Professor of History at Indiana University (Bloomington), has recast himself as a historical demographer whose body of work incorporates an interdisciplinary approach to the history of morbidity and mortality. His latest work, Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History, focuses on the global democratization of the expectation of long life (p. 221). Riley examines this "health transition" beginning (somewhat arbitrarily) at 1800 and extending to the present day. The global health transition has emerged from the health transitions of individual countries whose pursuit of longer life expectancies have taken divergent paths. Riley identifies six tactical areas for the reduction of mortality: public health, medicine, wealth and income, nutrition, behavior, and education (p. x). Extending life expectancy is a process that incorporates all six of these components to a greater or lesser degree. Rising Life Expectancy devotes a chapter to each tactical area and relates the history of how "each came to be recognized a means of controlling risks to survival" (p. xi). Riley argues that the much studied European and North American process of health transition is only one model among many, and that other nations and regions have been able to accomplish similar results with a differing emphasis on these tactical areas. This recipe for achieving the same relative life expectancy relies on the local character and resources for each region. For example, both Costa Rica and the United States have approximately the same level of life expectancy but have followed different programs (p. xii). |
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