New Books In Public Health

Two girls are born in the same Chicago hospital. Their neighborhoods—just seven train stops apart—will shape their futures and help determine how long they live. One will celebrate her eighty-fifth birthday. The other will die before sixty-five.

This is the death gap: lives lost too soon. Crossing the Gap: Healing Epidemics and Inequalities in a Divided City (U Chicago Press, 2026) asks how a city with world-class hospitals can tolerate an epidemic of premature death—and tells the story of the people fighting to end it.

In his landmark book The Death Gap, physician and health equity leader David A. Ansell exposed how structural racism and poverty shorten lives. He moves beyond diagnosis in Crossing the Gap to explore what happens when a major medical center joins forces with pastors, community organizers, residents, and young leaders on Chicago’s West Side to redefine what a hospital owes its neighbors. Part medical memoir and part urban chronicle, Crossing the Gap follows groundbreaking initiatives such as West Side United and the Sankofa Wellness Village as they confront decades of disinvestment and work to build healthier communities.

Through stories of collaboration, courage, conflict, and community leadership, Ansell shows how neighborhood voices, rigorous data, and moral imagination can transform health systems from bystanders into partners for change—not just in one city but throughout the nation.

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Based on the groundbreaking podcast of the same name, Last Day: How to Stop Losing Our Loved Ones to the Opioid Crisis (Gallery/Lemonada Books, 2026) is borne of Stephanie Wittels Wachs’s determination to shed light on the ongoing opioid epidemic in America. After the tragic and untimely death of her brother Harris Wittels to an opioid overdose, Stephanie connected with Jessica Cordova Kramer, whose brother died under nearly identical circumstances. Together they launched Last Day, a podcast that facilitates unflinching conversations with addiction specialists, harm reductionists, people in long-term recovery, public policy experts pushing for reform, and many others, to determine what could have saved their brothers lives and how we can prevent overdose deaths moving forward. This August, Steph published a book by the same name. Last Day weaves together a heartbreaking story of personal loss and an unflinching investigation of what could have prevented it. Alongside expert voices on opioid addiction, this book issues a clarion call for change in an ongoing and overwhelming opioid crisis.
In this episode, Steph and host Emily Dufton discuss Steph's transformational journey from acute grief to investigative reporting on the state of American drug treatment today. While she still struggles with the loss of Harris, Last Day, in book and podcast form, offer hope for potential solutions and a guidebook for people still in the thick of the struggle.
Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America and Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs.

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In 2018, Gyula Remes died in the underpass at Westminster tube station, just steps from the Houses of Parliament and luxury developments worth millions. How could this happen in one of the richest cities on Earth?
Episode one introduces Gyula and the world he died in: a Westminster plagued by the twin crises of homelessness and empty homes. In a London borough where extreme wealth exists alongside extreme poverty, Kojo traces the circumstances of Gyula’s death and a troubling question emerges.
What begins as a local tragedy opens the door to a much larger system, which we open onto a strange land called ‘offshore’.
Kojo Karam is a Professor in Law and Political Economy at the School of Law at Loughborough University.

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Veronica Villarreal earned her joint MHA/MBA at the University of Houston–Clear Lake, took her first job out of the program at DHR Health in the Rio Grande Valley, and worked her way up through revenue cycle and operations into the C-suite. She served as Chief Ambulatory Officer over a network of roughly 75 clinic locations and more than 30 specialty service lines. She then moved to UT Health Rio Grande Valley, where she is now Chief Operating Officer.
Along the way, she wrote the book she wishes someone had handed her. C-Suite Bound: How Self-Discovery Leads to Ultimate Success became an Amazon bestseller and was featured in Forbes.
In this episode, Veronica traces the actual route: why revenue cycle turned out to be an executive on-ramp rather than a detour, what an interim title really tests, what it takes to move from a private specialty network into an academic health system, and why she thinks comparison is the thing most likely to derail a talented person’s career.
Flight Path is produced by the Department of Healthcare Administration at the University of Houston–Clear Lake, which has offered healthcare administration education since 1974 and is based in the Texas Medical Center.
A University of Houston - Clear Lake MHA/MBA grad who climbed from revenue cycle to COO, and then wrote the roadmap for everyone behind her.
GUEST BIO
Veronica Villarreal, MHA/MBA, is Chief Operating Officer of UT Health Rio Grande Valley.
At UT Health RGV, she previously served as Assistant Vice President of Operations, leading multi-site ambulatory operations.
Before that, she was Chief Ambulatory Officer at DHR Health Clinics, overseeing approximately 75 clinic locations across more than 30 specialty and sub-specialty service lines.
She began her career in ambulatory revenue cycle.
She is the author of C-Suite Bound: How Self-Discovery Leads to Ultimate Success, an Amazon bestseller featured in Forbes.
She holds a joint Master of Healthcare Administration and Master of Business Administration from the University of Houston–Clear Lake.
LINKS FROM THIS EPISODE
C-Suite Bound: How Self-Discovery Leads to Ultimate Success
Veronica’s website
Veronica on LinkedIn
UHCL alumni feature, “From quiet corners to big impact”

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Mapping Medical Modernity: Urban Space and Public Health in Tokyo, 1868–1920 (U Pittsburgh Press, 2026) by Professor Susan L. Burns explores the history of medical modernization and public health in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Tokyo, a city undergoing rapid transformation from the seat of power of the Tokugawa shoguns of the Edo period to the capital of a modern nation-state and its expanding empire in the Meiji period.
Tracing the development of institutions and policies designed to improve medical care and public health in a dense urban environment, Professor Burns examines tensions between the involved parties—including doctors and policymakers, police and civil officials, residents and those who governed them—and provides case studies focused on three of the city’s major challenges in public health: syphilis, cholera, and mental illness. Drawing upon a wide range of archival materials and contemporary accounts, Dr. Burns also employs geographic information system analysis in mapping the complicated relationships interlinking aspects of the urban environment, social life, public policy, and commercialized medical culture to demonstrate visually how policy decisions and medical capitalism gradually reshaped existing spatial arrangements in the city as well as the social relations that unfolded within them.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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