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American Journal of Epidemiology Advance Access originally published online on February 10, 2009
American Journal of Epidemiology 2009 169(8):1039-1041; doi:10.1093/aje/kwp013
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American Journal of Epidemiology © The Author 2009. Published by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

BOOK REVIEWS

Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of Epidemiology

By Geoffrey C. Kabat

David A. Savitz

Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Center of Excellence in Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Disease Prevention, New York, NY 10029-6574

(e-mail: david.savitz@mssm.edu)

ISBN: 978-0-231-14148-2, Columbia University Press, Irvington, New York (Telephone: 914-591-9111, Fax: 1-800-944-1844, E-mail: cup_book@columbia.edu, World Wide Web: http://cup.columbia.edu), 2008, 272 pp., $27.95 Hardcover

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

For a scholarly book in epidemiology, Hyping Health Risks by Geoffrey C. Kabat is more reflective and opinionated than most and even has somewhat of a plot. Few books about epidemiology generate a visceral in addition to a solely cerebral response. On reading the book, I found passages causing offense and others eliciting support for Kabat's thoughtful and articulate laments. For the most part, the story of truth and misrepresentation of evidence on health risks was engaging, including personal portraits of good and evil intent. However, I did not always agree with the author on who belonged to which category and often found myself thinking, "that's not quite the whole story; it's more complicated than that," or "I can see why you'd interpret it that way, but I don't." Perhaps, being provocative in that way is a real credit to the author.

Kabat has written a fairly succinct treatise (272 . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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