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Arthur Kleinman. What Really Matters: Living a Moral Life Amidst Uncertainty and Danger. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 260 pp. Hardcover, $28.00.
Arthur Kleinman has been pre-eminent in advancing the mutual relevance of medicine and social science since his 1980 book, Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture. Kleinman's strategic use of his Harvard positions in both social medicine and anthropology and his editorial work, notably the 1997 Social Suffering collaboration with Veena Das and Margaret lock, have created an agenda for suffering as a social-scientific research topic. In What Really Matters Kleinman refines the writing style that made his 1988 book, The Illness Narratives, so widely accessible and influential. What Really Matters is a capstone work not only because it distills the core of Kleinman's thoughts about lives, morality, and suffering but also because the book's autobiographical aspects show the integration of Kleinman's own life with his scholarship.
Each of the book's chapters presents what might be called a literary oral history-not literal transcriptions but artful re-creations from clinical notes and memory-of the words and stories of six people whom Kleinman has known either as patients, research participants, or personal mentors. A seventh life history is about the physician and anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers, who is best known for having treated poet Siegfried Sassoon during World War I. Rivers had a distinguished research career as a neurologist, and his ethnographic fieldwork was influential in shaping British anthropology. His story stands out from the others because Kleinman did not know him personally, yet Rivers's life and commitments provide the gravitational center to the moral lessons of the other chapters. Rivers is Kleinman's idealized alter ego for his life project: "remaking the self as moral and political agent" (213) through a variety of scholarly interventions.
In most books intended for sales beyond academic readership, the subtitle is a marketing device. Kleinman's subtitle is a perfectly concise description of what his book offers: stories of how people live moral lives amid the uncertainties and dangers of war, disease, and both third-world and first-world inequalities. However useful Kleinman's...