This is a highly interesting and, in many parts, a truly cross-disciplinary book combining theories and empirical studies from biology, genetics, medicine, anthropology, epidemiology, sociology and economics. Some chapters (on this background) present interesting insights and concepts such as biological embedding and local biologies, illustrating how social and biological factors influence each other creating specific local disease patterns.

Despite the cross-disciplinary approach, the book also illustrates that even more inspiration could be gained from other disciplines, not least social epidemiology, which could learn from the more …