The Death Gap
How Inequality Kills
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents

Contents
Preface: One Street, Two Worlds
Part 1: American Roulette
Chapter 1: American Roulette
Chapter 2: Structural Violence and the Death Gap
Chapter 3: Location, Location, Location
Chapter 4: Perception Is Reality
Chapter 5: The Three Bs: Beliefs, Behavior, Biology
Part 2: Trapped by Inequity
Chapter 6: Fire and Rain: Life and Death in Natural Disasters
Chapter 7: Mass Incarceration, Premature Death, and Community Health
Chapter 8: Immigration Status and Health Inequality: The Case of Transplant
Part 3: Health Care Inequality
Chapter 9: The US Health Care System: Separate and Unequal
Chapter 10: The Poison Pill: Health Insurance in America
Part 4: The Cure
Chapter 11: Community Efficacy and the Death Gap
Chapter 12: Community Activism against Structural Violence
Chapter 13: Observe, Judge, Act
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Part 1: American Roulette
Chapter 1: American Roulette
Chapter 2: Structural Violence and the Death Gap
Chapter 3: Location, Location, Location
Chapter 4: Perception Is Reality
Chapter 5: The Three Bs: Beliefs, Behavior, Biology
Part 2: Trapped by Inequity
Chapter 6: Fire and Rain: Life and Death in Natural Disasters
Chapter 7: Mass Incarceration, Premature Death, and Community Health
Chapter 8: Immigration Status and Health Inequality: The Case of Transplant
Part 3: Health Care Inequality
Chapter 9: The US Health Care System: Separate and Unequal
Chapter 10: The Poison Pill: Health Insurance in America
Part 4: The Cure
Chapter 11: Community Efficacy and the Death Gap
Chapter 12: Community Activism against Structural Violence
Chapter 13: Observe, Judge, Act
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Review Quotes
Christian Century
"Compelling. . . . Without providing easy answers, Ansell challenges readers to be aware of health disparities and to work toward equality."
Clare Bambra | Times Higher Education
"This passionate polemic uses powerful patient stories to highlight the importance of neighbourhood conditions, healthcare inequalities and poverty in explaining the health gap between black and white Americans. Drawing on detailed case studies of racial inequalities in breast cancer mortality, the health consequences of mass imprisonment, immigration status and access to healthcare, the Chicago heatwave and Hurricane Katrina, Ansell vividly unpicks a spider’s web of causality. . . . This is a wide-ranging and very important book. Easy to read and engaging, it makes the social determinants come alive."
Beryl Satter, author of Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America
“Ansell does a magnificent job of uncovering the myriad ways in which structural racism — in housing, employment, education, and health care, for a start — creates unacceptable ‘death gaps’ or disparities in life expectancy that are preventable and therefore morally unacceptable. This moving study delivers the harsh truth about the ways that racism infects our nation’s health care system, and it does so with passion and eloquence. One comes away from Death Gap feeling inspired to act, and that’s a rare and wonderful accomplishment.”
Harold Pollack, University of Chicago
“The Death Gap describes critical health inequalities in the United States, which are drawn from Ansell’s gripping first-person experiences as a leading practitioner operating in Chicago’s medical safety net. He reveals the profound inequalities, particularly racial inequalities, that generate tremendous differences in lifespan and well-being across neighborhoods, and he provides powerful patient anecdotes that provide a human face to otherwise abstract challenges.”
Eve Ottenberg | Truthout
"How race and class affect health is demonstrated by a single statistic: Black women are 40 percent more likely to die from breast cancer than white women, though they develop it at the same rate... The Death Gap cites the three B’s – beliefs, behavior and biology – as the wrong explanations for health and life expectancy differences."
Association of Professional Chaplains
"...a valuable and challenging book for any audience."
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