In many ways my insights about premature death in the neighborhoods along Ogden Avenue follow directly in the footsteps of Friedrich Engels and Rudolf Virchow, both of whom wrote in the mid-1800s about social conditions and health...This book is written in the spirit of Engels and Virchow.
Anyone who knows real history understands that Engels flat out lied about factory working conditions in his day as well as the “blissful” lives of peasants before the Industrial Revolution. Ansell doesn’t have the courage to lie as blatantly as Engels did. As a magician uses sleight of hand to make the audience think he really is cutting the half-naked assistant in half while distracting them from the deception happening inside the box, Ansell fixes the readers’ attention on certain facts without allowing them to see other facts that would give them a different opinion of matters. For example, he wrote,
A greater proportion of Americans lived in poverty in 2015 – a staggering 45 million – than in the late 1960s.
