During the 1980s hundreds of thousands of refugees fled civil wars and death squads in Central America, seeking safe haven in the United States. Instead, thousands found themselves incarcerated in immigration prisons?abused by their jailors and deprived of the most basic legal and human rights. Drawing on declassified government documents and inter

In this issue of Pediatric Clinics of North America, guest editors Drs. Robert S. Kahn, Monica Mitchell, and Tina L. Cheng bring their considerable expertise to the topic of Achieving Child Health Equity. Health equity requires removing obstacles to health such as poverty, discrimination, and their consequences, including powerlessness and lack of access to good jobs with fair pay, quality education and housing, safe environments, and health care. In this issue, top experts provide up-to-date information to healthcare practitioners with the goal of implementing programs and policies to identify and address health care inequality for children. Contains 15 practice-oriented topics including clarity on disparity of healthcare in pediatrics: who, what, when, where and how; screening and addressing social determinants of health in pediatric practice; addressing structural racism in pediatric practice; addressing health literacy in pediatric practice; LGBTQ+ and child health equity; and more.  Provides in-depth clinical reviews of achieving child health equity, offering actionable insights for clinical practice.  Presents the latest information on this timely, focused topic under the leadership of experienced editors in the field. Authors synthesize and distill the latest research and practice guidelines to create clinically significant, topic-based reviews. 

During the 1980s hundreds of thousands of refugees fled civil wars and death squads in Central America, seeking safe haven in the United States. Instead, thousands found themselves incarcerated in immigration prisons--abused by their jailors and deprived of the most basic legal and human rights. Drawing on declassified government documents and interviews with prison officials, INS staff, and more than 3,000 Central American refugees, Robert S. Kahn reveals how the Department of Justice and its dependent agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, intentionally violated federal laws and regulations to deny protection to refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala who were fleeing wars financed by U.S. military aid.Kahn portrays the chilling reality of daily life in immigration prisons in Texas, Arizona, and Louisiana. Behind the razor-topped prison walls, refugees were not simply denied political asylum; they were beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, and sometimes tortured by prison guards."Other People's Blood" traces the ten-year legal struggle by volunteer prison workers and attorneys to stop the abuse of refugees and to force the Justice Department to concede in court that its treatment of immigrants had violated U.S. laws and the Geneva Convention for over a decade. Yet the case of "American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh, " which overturned more judicial decisions than any other case in U.S. history, is still virtually unknown in the United States, and today the debate over illegal immigration is being carried on with little awareness of the government policies that contributed so shamefully to this country's immigration problems.

The Grosse Fuge, composed by Ludwig van Beethoven in his late period, has an involved and complicated history. Written for a string quartet but published as an independent work, the piece raises interesting questions about whether music without words can have meaning, and invokes speculation about the composer and his frame of mind when he wrote it. Kahn looks closely at the musical, aesthetic, philosophical, and historical problems the work raises, considering its history, structure and development, meaning, and response among critics and contemporaries. Kahn also studies Beethoven's difficulties with publishers and sponsors, his everyday life, and his character in light of recent advances in the pharmacology of depressive illness. The book places both Beethoven and the Grosse Fuge in their historic and social contexts, arguing that Beethoven intended the Fuge as the finale of his String Quartet Opus 130 and created a substitute finale for the quartet at his publisher's urging; not because he was unhappy with the work. Beethoven is examined as a freelance musician: a vocation whose members were frequently excluded from society and the protection of its laws, including respect for copyright. Viewed in this light, Beethoven's famous quirks and resentments become understandable, even rational. Kahn also devotes a chapter to the phenomenon of synesthesia a sense of motion through three-dimensional volumes of space examining how some works of Western music can evoke synesthesia in listeners. He also speculates that Beethoven's creative dry spell in his late 40s was caused by an extended bout with clinical depression. Written for a general audience and including a bibliography and index, this fascinating study will interest scholars and fans of classical music and Beethoven.