France gets health care—U.S. gets, what, exactly?

An Agence France-Presse story gives a brief summary of a new Commonwealth Fund study showing that the French success (and U.S. failure) in providing health care described by Paul Dutton in Differential Diagnoses remains profound: “France is tops, and the United States dead last, in providing timely and effective healthcare to its citizens, according to a survey Tuesday of preventable deaths in 19 industrialized countries.”

France is healthcare leader, US comes dead last: study (AFP)

The full article describing the study’s results is here:

Measuring the Health of Nations (Health Affairs)

Birds as a source of “Winter Interest” in the garden

Plenty Magazine features an article today (1/9/200 on birds in the winter garden. Susan Brackney writes: “I’m planning to add even more bird-friendly shrubs and flowers — think viburnums, sunflowers, and zinnias — in hopes that I’ll see an increase in the numbers of rare birds flitting from stem to stem over the coming years.” For advice on how to similarly liven up your own property, please turn to The Audubon Society to Attracting Birds, Second Edition by Stephen W. Kress.
Gardening: The Real Source of “Winter Interest” (Plenty)

ILR Press authors on Comedy Central

Two of the funniest men in America also know where to go for expert opinions: Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert both turned to authors from the ILR Press imprint of Cornell University Press their first night back on the air during the WGA strike. On January 7, Jon Stewart featured Ron Seeber, coeditor of Organizing to Win: New Research on Union Strategies, Restoring the Promise of American Labor Law, and, perhaps most to the point, Under the Stars: Essays on Labor Relations in Arts and Entertainment. Stephen Colbert spoke with Richard Freeman, coauthor of What Workers Want, Updated Edition and coeditor of What Workers Say: Employee Voice in the Anglo-American Workplace.

Cronenberg: “Eastern Promises” Inspired by Cornell’s “Violent Entrepreneurs”

In a September 13, 2007, interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, which was rebroadcast in December ahead of the film’s DVD release and three Golden Globe nominations, director David Cronenberg cited Vladimir Volkov’s 2002 Cornell UP book, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism, as one of the inspirations for his critically acclaimed 2007 thriller, Eastern Promises, which stars Viggo Mortensen as a London-based Russian mobster. In his interview with host Terry Gross, Cronenberg identified the book as important in shaping his view of the Russian underworld depicted in the film as the “rawest, most virulent form of capitalism” and his characters as “ardent capitalists.”

Like the film, the book Violent Entrepreneurs has been critically acclaimed and has become a bestseller on Cornell’s political science list, widely used in courses on post-Soviet Russia and criminology. According to the New York Review of Books, “Volkov supplies the missing link between almost everything else you may read about business in post-Communist Russia and almost everything else you can read about organized crime there. He treats the two activities, business and crime, with equal respect as fields of sociological inquiry, and so arrives at the first satisfying account of how they affect each other.” Fans of the film wanting to know more about the fascinating world of Russian organized crime should put Violent Entrepreneurs at the top of their reading list.