Popular Science Review - Status Syndrome

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Review - Status Syndrome - Michael Marmot

A little while ago I wrote a book on stress management that consisted of a set of quick-to-implement exercises and techniques, because no one has time to do some heavy life change all at one go. (The book is Instant Stress Management by Brian Clegg.) The techniques in the book were based on a number of principles, and one of the major ones was that stress was largely driven by how much control you had over your life. Michael Marmot, author of Status Syndrome is the man behind this principle. From his groundbreaking work on stress in the British civil service in the 1970s, he has amassed more and more information to support his thesis that health and life expectancy are both powerfully influenced by our social standing and ability to control our lives.

This shouldn't be underrated - it's very important stuff. And as such the topic of the book is, itself, fascinating. But unfortunately Marmot is a better scientist than he is writer. Although he as an entertainingly wry turn of phrase, the book is full of repetition (to the extent that it's possible to imagine the whole thing could have been condensed effectively into a magazine feature) and lurches from direction to direction leaving the reader confused.

Perhaps the worst problem is that it is difficult to attribute causality in dealing with statistics. Infamously, after the second world war, for a good number of years there was a strong correlation between the number of bananas imported in the UK and the number of women getting pregnant - but no one was suggesting that the bananas caused the pregnancies. Similarly, Marmot has to untangle a whole cat's cradle of connections between possible causes and statistically linked outcomes. He does so, but only by a huge amount of repetition of this might imply that, but then what about this, and so on, and so on.

In the end, the detail provided is much too much for a popular science title - much more appropriate to a scholarly tome - yet this clearly is intended to be popular science and the result is to fall uncomfortably between two stools.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is the final chapter which is unashamedly political (though those who disagree with its message would probably say it has no place in such a book.) The message of this book is politically and scientifically important, and deeply exciting to the thinking reader - it's just such a shame that to get to the message you have to plough through so much unnecessary verbiage.

Also in hardback

Reviewed by Jo Reed

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