Poverty and the public health crisis in the developing world lately have occupied a more prominent place in public discourse, due in part to recent, well-publicized campaigns led and/or fronted by politicians, public health officials, and A-list celebrities. Yet the statistics, if all-too-familiar, tell a different and more depressing story: HIV/AIDS has claimed the lives of 30 million people worldwide and continues to pose a threat to the long-term viability of countries on four continents; tuberculosis kills 15 million people a year; half the world's population lives on less than two dollars a day; and so on, to the point of despair.

Compiled by William H. Foege, senior medical advisor for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with Nils Daulaire, president of the Global Health Council, Robert E. Black, professor and department chair at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Clarence E. Pearson, senior advisor to the World Health Organization, Global Health Leadership and Management, an anthology of seventeen essays, attempts to dispel the fog of misunderstanding and apprehension about many of these seemingly intractable problems.

Leadership — like personal advice and most kinds of counsel — is based on credibility and experience. Foege has enlisted a distinguished group of public health leaders to shed light on the global challenges confronting us, including UN secretary-general Kofi Annan; the late Lee Jong-wok, director-general of the World Health Organization; Melinda Gates; and Raymond Gilmartin, CEO of pharmaceutical giant Merck. The collection also includes an essay by John R. Seffrin that is informed by the lessons of the London cholera epidemic of 1849 as well as his own experiences as chief executive officer of the American Cancer Society, where he oversaw a major revision of the organization's mission to accommodate "collaboration [with governmental, research, and philanthropic groups] as an organizational priority."

If current global health crises can be blamed, as this volume argues, on the convergence of three factors — a dramatic increase in global population density, globalization, and government funding shortfalls — it is the developing world's burden to consult history and, armed with its lessons, do a better job of managing these crises. In fact, the notion that global public health challenges can and must be vanquished through effective collaboration and better management surfaces again and again in these essays. Or, as Foege writes in his preface: "the only two barriers [to solving these problems] are the mobilization of resources and the actual delivery of our science capacity. This comes down to creative and efficient management. Global health waits expectantly for management to match its science."

At the same time, the book gathers a number of essays which suggest that the recent interest in global health is driven, at least in part, by less-than-altruistic motives. The recasting in many taxonomies of "international health" or "tropical medicine" as "global health" reflects the now orthodox premise that "the problems of both rich and poor countries are so intertwined they must be understood as a unity." Moreover, as Gilmartin rather candidly explains, "we live in a time when severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in China can send red ink flowing from Thai airlines to Toronto theaters....[F]or corporations to maintain and extend markets from the developed world to emerging markets and on to all nations of the world, we must create a foundation of political stability that can only come by addressing global health challenges."

Aimed at public health professionals yet accessible to the general reader, this highly readable collection acknowledges the occasional ray of hope — on HIV/AIDS, for example — while reminding us that the challenges of strategy, implementation, and sustained commitment (as called for in the Millennium Development Goals) are enormous — as are the stakes. As Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, reminds us: "The rich countries have to understand that there is no chance for political and social stability in the world if they do not help the poor fight the war against disease. Disease leads to extreme poverty; extreme poverty leads to political instability; political instability leads to state failure; and state failure, alas, leads to violence, criminality, and havens for terrorism, not to mention the internal transmission of disease itself."

Though at times offering competing, if not contradictory, solutions to the problems of poverty and failed or failing public health systems in the developing world, Global Health Leadership and Management ultimately succeeds as both an illuminating introduction and a revealing survey of current policy thinking in the field.