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A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease
by Daisy Hernández
Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple.
No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases. Even into her thirties, she only knew that her aunt had died of Chagas, a rare and devastating illness that affects the heart and digestive system. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas―or the kissing bug disease―is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus.
After her aunt's death, Hernández began searching for answers. Crisscrossing the country, she interviewed patients, doctors, epidemiologists, and even veterinarians with the Department of Defense. She learned that in the United States more than three hundred thousand people in the Latinx community have Chagas, and that outside of Latin America, this is the only country with the native insects―the "kissing bugs"―that carry the Chagas parasite.
Through unsparing, gripping, and humane portraits, Hernández chronicles a story vast in scope and urgent in its implications, exposing how poverty, racism, and public policies have conspired to keep this disease hidden. A riveting and nuanced investigation into racial politics and for-profit healthcare in the United States, The Kissing Bug reveals the intimate history of a marginalized disease and connects us to the lives at the center of it all.
"This vivid, multidimensional account brings an ongoing medical injustice to light." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A deeply personal, unsparing analysis of how neglected diseases disproportionately affect marginalized peoples in the world's richest country―and why they need not." ―Kirkus Reviews
"Blending family and medical history, this account is especially relevant in an era of pandemics." ―Library Journal
"With The Kissing Bug, Daisy Hernández takes her place alongside great science writers like Rebecca Skloot and Mary Roach, immersing herself in the deeply personal subject of a deadly insect-borne disease that haunted her own family. It's a tender and compelling personal saga, an incisive work of investigative journalism, and an absolutely essential perspective on global migration, poverty, and pandemics." ―Amy Stewart, author of Wicked Bugs
"The Kissing Bug is a deft mix of family archaeology, parasite detective story, and American reckoning. A much-needed addition to the canon." ―Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, author of When We Do Harm: A Doctor Confronts Medical Error
This information about The Kissing Bug was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Daisy Hernández is a former reporter for The New York Times and has been writing about the intersections of race, immigration, class, and sexuality for almost two decades. She has written for National Geographic, NPR's All Things Considered and Code Switch, The Atlantic, Slate, and Guernica, and she's the former editor of Colorlines, a newsmagazine on race and politics. Hernández is the author of the award-winning memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed and co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism. She is an associate professor at Miami University in Ohio.
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