Unmasked, Emily Mendenhall
Unmasked, Emily Mendenhall
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
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Unmasked
COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji

Author: Emily Mendenhall

Narrator: Joana Garcia

Unabridged: 7 hr 57 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/26/2022


Synopsis

Unmasked is the story of what happened in Okoboji, a small Iowan tourist town, when a collective turn from the coronavirus to the economy occurred in the COVID summer of 2020. State political failures, local negotiations among political and public health leaders, and community (dis)belief about the virus resulted in Okoboji being declared a hotspot just before the Independence Day weekend, when an influx of half a million people visit the town.

The story is both personal and political. Author Emily Mendenhall, an anthropologist at Georgetown University, grew up in Okoboji, and her family still lives there. As the events unfolded, Mendenhall was in Okoboji, where she spoke formally with over 100 people and observed a community that rejected public health guidance, revealing deep-seated mistrust in outsiders and strong commitments to local thinking. Unmasked is a fascinating and heartbreaking account of where people put their trust, and how isolationist popular beliefs can be in America's small communities.

About Emily Mendenhall

Emily Mendenhall is a professor of global health in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She is the author of Rethinking Diabetes: Entanglements of Trauma, Poverty, and HIV and Syndemic Suffering: Social Distress, Depression, and Diabetes among Mexican Immigrant Women, and coeditor of Global Mental Health: Anthropological Perspectives.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Pam

This book is well written, very readable by anyone and offers insight to why people with the same roots and family can be so very divided first by masks and later by Covid vaccinations. During our Covid years, like many people, I have often been shocked, taken aback, surprised or hurt by vitriolic r......more

Goodreads review by Scott

In anthropology, an ethnography is an account of the culture as told by the people in that culture. As such, it’s basically a fancy word for a series of interviews within a group of people linked together. In this work, Mendenhall, a medical anthropologist working at Georgetown University, offers us......more