Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination
"This  book is a revelation. Alondra Nelson…provides the deep context for our  current conversation about the health disparities that plague the  African-American community…[and] adds immeasurably to our knowledge of  the Black Panther Party…Nelson is the first scholar I know of to bring  these two histories into dialogue with each other, and she does so with  spectacular results. This is a tremendously important book."  –Henry Louis  Gates, Jr., Harvard University"Alondra Nelson combines careful research, deep political insight, and passionate commitment to tell the little-known story of the Black Panther Party's health activism in the late 1960s."–Rebecca Skloot, author ofThe Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"Nelson...reports exhaustively on the Black Panther Party's role in the radical health movement of the 1970s, positioning the BPP as important players in the long tradition of civil rights health activism...[The] work deserves commendation for its thoughtfulness and thoroughness."–Publishers Weekly"Body and Soulis well researched and powerfully argued, and it skillfully bridges several scholarly fields…By any measure, Nelson’s book is an important contribution."–The Crisis"Nelson makes a valuable contribution by demonstrating that the Party’s medical outreach programs were a continuation of a tradition of self-reliance that began in the nineteenth century… Body and Soul will serve as the catalyst for continued analysis of other useful aspects of BPP history."–Journal of American History“a sympathetic, scholarly account of this lesser-known aspect of Panther activism...a valuable contribution to the literature...in sociology, medical and social history, and African American studies.”–Library Journal"highly informative, meticulously documented, extremely relevant, and deeply engaging"–The Black Commentator"Delving  deeper, Nelson writes about the group’s understanding of health as a  basic human right and the social implications of genetics that, decades  ago, seemed to anticipate the current debates about the politics of  health and race."–Diverse Issues in Higher Education