Make a Difference: The Founder of the "I Have a Future Program" Shares His Vision for Young America - Hardcover

Foster, Jr. Henry W.; Foster, Dr. Henry W.; Foster M. D., Henry W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684826852 ISBN 13: 9780684826851

Publisher: Scribner, 1997

Synopsis

The physician who became a controversial nominee for surgeon general shares his views on racism, teen pregnancy, health care, self-esteem, and other issues in a memoir and prescription for change. 50,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Henry W. Foster, Jr., M.D., serves as Senior Advisor to President Clinton on Teen Pregnancy Reduction and Youth Issues. He is professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Meharry Medical College, where he served as Chair of the department for seventeen years.

Reviews

A reserved, rather sketchy autobiography by the man whose nomination to succeed Joycelyn Elders as surgeon general was defeated in 1995. Foster keeps his emotions well in check while describing his childhood as a middle-class, achievement-oriented black youth in the segregated South of the 1930s and '40s, and his experiences as a medical student at the virtually all-white University of Arkansas in the 1950s. After completing his residency, Foster moved rapidly up the career ladder, becoming chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Tuskegee Institute's hospital, the center of medical care for Alabama's poor black population. His innovative tiered system of health care services based on outreach clinics soon became the model for other states and led to Foster's election to the National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine, where he was asked to study the health effects of legalized abortion. He was later tapped by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to direct a project on how to consolidate health services for high-risk adolescents, which led eventually to his ``I Have a Future'' program, based in Nashville's public housing projects. Clearly a public-spirited citizen and compassionate physician, Foster recounts his professional accomplishments with quiet pride, but his personal life remains pretty much a closed book. In his later chapters, however, the man himself finally becomes visible. When his nomination as surgeon general ran into opposition from antiabortion forces, the inexplicably naive Foster received a bruising education in politics, and he's still stinging from it. He hasn't given up wanting to make a difference, however. As President Clinton's senior advisor for teen pregnancy and youth issues, he concludes here with a candid assessment of the country's public health needs and a ``domestic medical Marshall Plan'' to deal with them. A rich, full life that deserves a more complete telling. (Author tour; radio satellite tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Foster's modest book should satisfy many simply because it is, among other things, his reply to the assaults he endured in 1995 when nominated--ultimately unsuccessfully--to be surgeon general of the U.S. Public Health Service. While growing up in rural Arkansas, Foster was expected to study hard, work hard, and make a difference. He was highly successful at Morehouse College and earned his MD degree at the University of Arkansas. After military service, he developed an innovative system of clinics in the poor Tuskegee area that became a national model. He later launched the "I Have a Future" program for preventing teenage pregnancy, and he emphasizes the need for sex education and family life programs. When he gets to his luckless surgeon general nomination, he gives an eye-opening, stomach-twisting account of it. Throughout, he freely reports mistakes as well as successes and often couches perceptive and ironic observations in enlivening humor. Medical administrator, government consultant, and even airplane pilot as well as physician, Foster deeply understands medicine's social role. William Beatty

Foster, a Clinton nominee for U.S. surgeon general, received national publicity during his unsuccessful Senate confirmation hearings, and he believes the process injured his reputation. This book is in part his response to the misinformation that he felt was circulated about him during the hearings. His account of growing up in the segregated South, going to medical school, and becoming an obstetrician/gynecologist is an inspiring black success story. Unfortunately, his biography must be compared with Joycelynn Elders's memoir (From Sharecropper's Daughter to Surgeon General of the United States, LJ 9/15/96), with its more winning litereary style. Elders kept a sense of humor that is missing from Foster's occasionally didactic autobiography. Still, this is a good choice for larger collections.?James Swanton, Harlem Hosp. Lib., New York
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684826852
• ISBN 13: 9780684826851
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192