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THE KISSING BUG

A true story of a family, an insect, and a nation's neglect of a deadly disease.

by Daisy Hernández ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2021

A compelling indictment of our failing health care system and the people falling through its ever widening cracks.

A deeply personal, unsparing analysis of how neglected diseases disproportionately affect marginalized peoples in the world’s richest country—and why they need not.

While Covid-19 continues to circle the globe and wealthy countries clamor for vaccines, dozens of “neglected tropical diseases” are ravaging more than 1 billion people living in developing regions of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The treatments for some of these are available, but accessing them can be difficult or impossible. When these diseases appear in developed, Northern Hemisphere countries, they are rarely diagnosed accurately by doctors, who did not learn about them in medical schools, and sociocultural barriers, political choices, and racism further limit options for care. In her latest, Hernández, a professor of English and former New York Times reporter, explores her family’s struggles with Chagas disease, better known as “kissing bug disease.” The author highlights how poverty, policies that limit health care for immigrants and marginalized peoples, and the worldwide neglect of public health infrastructure all contribute to the 10,000 deaths among the 6 million cases of Chagas disease in the Americas, 300,000 of which are in the U.S. The heroes of this story are not only the doctors, nurses, public health professionals, and volunteers who work tirelessly testing for and treating the disease—as well as identifying and controlling infestations of kissing bugs ( Triatoma species) and the Trypanosoma parasite that causes the illness—but also the patients and support groups who have increased awareness of it, especially in Texas and California, where it is most prevalent in the U.S. And, of course, the tireless family members–cum-caregivers like Hernández. The author’s Tía Dora, who lived with and died from Chagas disease, changed Hernández’s life. Her story, ably rendered by the author, should open readers’ eyes to a persistent plague.

Pub Date: June 1, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-951142-52-0

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Tin House

Review Posted Online: April 7, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | HEALTH & FITNESS | U.S. GOVERNMENT | PUBLIC POLICY | ETHNICITY & RACE | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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edited by Daisy Hernández & Bushra Rehman

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New York Times Bestseller

by Stephanie Johnson & Brandon Stanton illustrated by Henry Sene Yee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2022

A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.

A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.

Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.

Pub Date: July 12, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton photographed by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton ; photographed by Brandon Stanton

LOVE, PAMELA

by Pamela Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2023

A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.

The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.

According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that ." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy , which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.

Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023

ISBN: 9780063226562

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023

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Book Reviews

'the kissing bug' challenges which diseases matter — and why.

Kristen Martin

The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease, by Daisy Hernández Tin House Books hide caption

The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease, by Daisy Hernández

Daisy Hernández was a child in the early 1980s when her mother's youngest sister, Dora, traveled from her native Colombia to the United States to seek treatment for a disease that left her stomach so distended that people assumed she was pregnant.

In Colombia, doctors had resected Dora's colon — they told her she had "enough for ten people" — and gave her a colostomy bag, but she still needed several more abdominal surgeries when she came to live with Hernández's family in New Jersey. The family line on what had made Dora so sick? "She ate an apple."

Hernández didn't learn until much later that her aunt's disease was caused by a parasite spread through the bites of triatomine bugs, also known as kissing bugs. The kissing bug disease, or Chagas, is endemic in Latin America, where the blood-sucking bugs come out at night to feast, leaving swollen bites near people's lips. Dora's infection might have indeed come from eating a contaminated apple years before her digestive system started unraveling.

Hernández's book The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease weaves together family memoir and investigative journalism to come to terms with the disease that ultimately killed her aunt. Through piecing together her own family's story, the history of Chagas, and the stories of other patients' illnesses, Hernández raises damning questions about which infectious diseases get attention and whom we believe to be deserving of care.

I had never heard of kissing bugs or Chagas before encountering Hernández's book. Living in the northeast, the only vector-borne disease I have ever worried about is Lyme. Unlike Lyme, Chagas kills more than 10,000 people a year. The disease results in cardiac problems for about 20% to 30% percent of patients. Hernández explains that the parasite can live in the body for decades, "quietly interrupting the electric currents of the heart, devouring the heart muscle, leaving behind pockets where once healthy tissue existed." More rarely, it eats away at the esophagus and colon, as in Dora's case. All of this is preventable if the infection is caught early and treated with the anti-parasitic benznidazole, but patients often only develop debilitating symptoms years after getting bitten, when it is too late for such treatments.

The CDC estimates that 300,000 people in the U.S. have Chagas. For the most part, they are immigrants from Latin America who were infected there. And this is why most American doctors do not know about Chagas or how to treat it, and why it is classified as a neglected tropical disease — it primarily afflicts poor immigrants.

The Kissing Bug starts out in memoir-mode, told mostly from Hernández's younger perspective when she knew next to nothing about her aunt's disease because it was only whispered about. By starting with the personal, Hernández allows readers to comprehend how a bug bite rendered a woman sick for most of her life.

Before her symptoms developed, Dora was an ambitious young woman who put herself through college and taught elementary school. After settling in New Jersey, she taught Spanish, helped raise Hernández and her sister, and found love. But the parasite was still alive in Dora's body after her surgeries, and it would later attack her esophagus. She died in 2010 at the age of 59 after her heart stopped during yet another medical procedure, a shock to the family despite her long illness. "To me, she was not the kind of woman who died," Hernández writes. "She was a woman who lived close to death."

Hernández's strained relationship with her aunt, who refused to accept her queer identity, complicated her grief. When she started researching kissing bugs a few years after Dora died, she told herself that her interest had little to do with her aunt. But in writing The Kissing Bug, Hernàndez fills the silences between she and Dora, finding out everything her aunt had never known about the disease that killed her.

Hernández is trained as a reporter, and she approaches the quest to learn about kissing bugs with journalistic tenacity. She travels to Bogotà, where she meets with a professor who has been studying the bugs since the 1970s. She spends an evening in a field in Texas, trapping kissing bugs — they live in the American South, too, and U.S.-native bugs have infected some people. While meticulously researched, this section of the book lags as we lose the thread of how these insects, and the policy decisions around this disease, impact patients.

The Kissing Bug hits its stride in the last section, when Hernández tells the stories of poor and uninsured Chagas patients who face barriers in receiving appropriate care. We meet patients like Carlos, who was on his second pacemaker in his 40s when he was finally diagnosed because he happened upon doctor in Boston who knew about the disease. His stack of medical bills, and the fact that his condition has made it difficult for him to work, haunt him. We also learn that a terrifying repercussion of living with Chagas is passing it along to your baby, as happened to Janet in Maryland. She didn't know she was infected until her son was born prematurely with his heart already affected by the disease. He spent weeks in the NICU before doctors finally tested him for Chagas. Both Carlos and Janet are immigrants from Latin America. Their stories highlight that our country has accepted that poor immigrants' diseases matter less.

The Kissing Bug comes at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare health inequities both within the United States and globally. In the U.S., people of color have been disproportionally more likely to experience severe illness and death from COVID. Now, as our case and death numbers have dramatically decreased due to expanded vaccine access — nearly half of the country has received at least one vaccine dose — South America and India are experiencing surges. In both regions, vaccines have reached only a small fraction of the population.

Ultimately, The Kissing Bug reminds us that our work at balancing health inequities cannot stop with controlling COVID domestically. Toward the end of the book , Hernández writes of "the great epi divide," a term coined by physician Paul Farmer. "People on one side of the epidemiological divide, Dr. Farmer argues, will die of diseases related to old age, while those on the other side will die much younger because medicine for treatable diseases is too expensive." To Hernández, the great epi divide explains the choices the United States has made in public health funding — choices that keep infectious diseases like Chagas contained within "a Second America." But the great epi divide "can change if we want it to."

Kristen Martin's writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, The Baffler, and elsewhere.

Southern Review of Books

Book reviews and author interviews with a Southern focus.

‘The Kissing Bug’ Explores the Personal and Global Impacts of a Deadly Disease

B icho. Vinchuca. Chinche. Pito. Bloodsucker. Blood-sucking cone-nose. The Barber. Kissing bug. So many names for triatomine insects, those blood-sucking night stalkers who often carry T. cruzi , the parasite responsible for Chagas.

If you’ve never heard of Chagas, you’re in good company. In Daisy Hernández’s engaging and dynamic new book, The Kissing Bug: A True Story of an Insect, a Family, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease , the author admits that she didn’t know what it was either when her Tía Dora was wasting away from this disease during the 1980s. Hernández’s family, like many families who live in South or Central America, like many families of Latinx origins in the United States, had members who lost their lives to heart, esophagus, and intestine stretching and weakening under the destructive weight of the T. cruzi parasite. Many of these people are not aware they have been infected before it’s too late. Some of them are born with the infection. Many people live full lives without consequences. Others die painfully.

The memoir elements of this book are warm and rich with Spanish language and stories around the kitchen table. Hernández shares her memories generously and with love, even when recounting Tía Dora’s disapproval. The author was the niece who wouldn’t wear her hair in cute ponytails, who wouldn’t answer “Señora?” when called, who wouldn’t greet Tía Dora with formality. She was the disappointment to Tía Dora when she came out as queer; however, she was also the niece who translated in the hospital room at six years old, at whom Tía Dora beamed as if she were “the smartest girl alive.”

The personal yields to a broader narrative of the parasite itself and those outside Hernández’s family who live with it, those who treat the sick, and those who work to increase awareness. The author takes the reader with her as she visits the Insectario in Bogota, where researchers study the kissing bugs; on a hunt for the insects in the early Texas morning; to the basement of an evangelical church in Virginia, where they are screening for T. cruzi . Hernández writes lovingly about Carlos, Maira, Janet’s baby, and others who live with Chagas. Knowing the narratives of these individuals compels the reader to care about the treatment and management of this disease on a broader scale.

Hernández wants you to know that Chagas is a public health crisis, but it’s also a problem of the poor, the undocumented, of the Second America, the one nice white middle class people don’t see. When she’s not writing about her journeys to learn about Chagas, she’s writing about Austin State Hospital, where in 1943, a young, black man was infected with T. cruzi for research purposes; Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli, who sent the price of benznidazole, the drug used to treat the parasite, sky high; Lucia, a patient who died from Chagas because she couldn’t afford a heart transplant. A reader walks away from The Kissing Bug with more knowledge and empathy than they had before and a sense that something must be done to save lives and narrow the “epi divide.”

Daisy Hernández compellingly balances memoir with discovery as she highlights the human toll of zoonotic infections on families. She reminds us that the natural world dazzles and can kill you with a kiss. Even in our COVID-weary world, The Kissing Bug is a book for now.

NONFICTION The Kissing Bug: A True Story of an Insect, a Family, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease By Daisy Hernández Tin House Books Published June 1, 2021

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Posted by: Rachel Lutwick-Deaner

Rachel Lutwick-Deaner is an Assistant Professor of English at Grand Rapids Community College. She has a BA from Colgate University, an MA from North Carolina State University, and she is currently working on an MFA in creative non-fiction from Queens University of Charlotte. Rachel has taught writing for over 20 years, and when she is not reading or grading student papers, she can be found cooking or spending time with her family in East Grand Rapids, MI.

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A Powerful and Personal Tale of the Kissing Bug and Its Deadly Cargo

Author daisy hernández blends memoir and science in her new book on chagas disease., emily cataneo.

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Kissing bug. James Gathany/CDC

This story was originally published by  Undark  and is reproduced here as part of the  Climate Desk  collaboration.

I n the 1940s, a promising Armenian-American researcher in Texas wanted to understand more about a parasite called Trypanosoma cruzi , which lives in a species of insects colloquially called kissing bugs. He knew that local kissing bugs transmitted the parasite to other mammals, but he wanted to know if humans could contract it, too. So, he stuffed a crushed kissing bug into the eye of a young Black man, who, according to the researcher’s personal correspondence, may have been a psychiatric patient at Austin State Hospital. Sure enough, a few weeks later, the parasite, which can destroy the heart of its host, appeared in the man’s blood.

T. cruzi and kissing bugs appear in human history far earlier than the horrifically racist medical experiments of the mid-20th century. T. cruzi has been found in mummies from 9,000 years ago. Charles Darwin may have had T. cruzi . Gilded Age-era American reporters christened the insects “kissing bugs” after an outbreak spurred dozens of news reports; a decade later, a Brazilian doctor isolated the parasite in a local toddler and gave the zoonotic disease its common name, Chagas. Since the 1980s, many of the millions of people living with Chagas in Latin America have immigrated to the United States. In The Kissing Bug: The True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease , reporter, memoirist, and professor Daisy Hernández chronicles the story of these people, and the racially fraught history of this disease, which is incurable unless it’s caught early and treated with a rare drug.

This story is a personal one for Hernández. When she was a little girl growing up in New Jersey, one of her Colombian aunts, Tía Dora, traveled to the tri-state area to seek medical care for a mysterious disease that had swelled her stomach. In New York, Dora was diagnosed with Chagas, which is cousin to the sleeping sickness caused by the African tsetse fly. She spent the next decades fluctuating between health and sickness, in and out of the hospital, her esophagus collapsing. (Although the parasite usually targets the heart, it occasionally destroys other organs.) The disease eventually killed her.

“The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease,” by Daisy Hernández.

There was plenty that Hernández’s family didn’t talk about when she was a girl: Another aunt claimed that Dora had fallen ill from eating an apple, and no one ever acknowledged the poverty and medical racism that exacerbated Dora’s plight. As an adult, in the wake of her aunt’s death, Hernández grappled with her grief by learning more about the disease. Her family was not alone in avoiding discussion of it: She writes that “even among the neglected, [Chagas] has long been ignored.”

As part of her quest, Hernández travels to Bogotá to meet with a professor who’s battling the insect and meets kissing bugs in jars in the university’s insectario . She battles her fear of six-legged creatures and hunts for the bugs at dusk with researchers at Texas A&M University. In Iowa, she views T. cruzi through a microscope with a researcher who has samples of the parasite isolated from a person who lived in Chile in the 1940s.

Hernández also tracks down other Chagas sufferers, 300,000 of whom are thought to live in the United States. She meets Janet, a Hispanic woman in Maryland who had to have an emergency C-section during her second pregnancy and whose son nearly died from mysterious complications. Nobody knew what was wrong with him until they called family members in Latin America. Hernández meets a man who receives a heart transplant after the ravages of the parasite; an infected Los Angeles woman who has to have regular scans to monitor her heart wall; a Texas woman who contracted the disease from a local kissing bug.

Kissing bugs do live in the United States, in a swath across the southern half of the country, but overall, cases of so-called homegrown Chagas are rare. The people who make up the bulk of Chagas cases in the United States are either immigrants from Latin America, who contract it there as children, or children of immigrants from Latin America, who inherit the parasite from their mothers.

This demographic truth contributes to Hernández’s dawning realization that she was lied to as a girl when teachers told her that disease knows no racial or class boundaries. Disease itself is innocent of racism, of course, but our systems are guilty (as has been made abundantly clear since Covid-19 arrived on American shores) and these engrained prejudices shape which diseases and sick people receive attention and which do not. Chagas is confined to what Hernández calls “a second America,” one whose maladies aren’t taught in medical schools: 84 percent of OB-GYNs said “I don’t know” when asked if expectant mothers could pass on the disease to babies. It is true that only 20 to 30 percent of people with Chagas become sick, and a much smaller percentage die, but, Hernández argues, even “one lost baby is impossible to bear.”

Chagas patients also have to navigate the byzantine American health care system. Janet, the Maryland woman whose newborn fell ill with Chagas, had no health insurance and knew she would have to pay out of pocket for her own treatment for the disease. When Dora first arrived in New York, she relied on the kindness of a first-generation Jewish doctor who didn’t report her for overstaying her visa. Then there’s the cost of prescription drugs. In 2015, notorious “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli tried to hike the price of benznidazole, a drug used to fight Chagas, sparking a brief Twitter spat between him and Hernández.

The power of this book lies not just in Hernández’s unflinching journalistic examination of the racism and classism embedded in the U.S. and international health care systems, but also in the blend of this examination with her complicated grief over Dora. This is no book about an angelic aunt snatched too soon: Dora stopped speaking to Hernández when Hernández came out as queer, and when Dora died, Hernández wondered why she was drowning in grief for someone who was so horrid to her. Her search for the kissing bugs is partly an extirpation and examination of that grief; she eventually concludes that she is mourning not her relationship with Dora, but how that relationship might have healed had Dora lived.

Hernández also brings a literary flair to her subject. Her mother is a “rag doll of a woman” and her dad a “jack-in-the-box,” while a refrigerator is a “giant potato.” This style unifies the journalistic and memoiristic aspects of the book while also serving to ground and enliven the scientific descriptions: For example, she writes that T. cruzi can shapeshift from “an eel with a Mohawk” to a “lavender coin” during its deadly hunt for cells.

Ultimately, the book is propulsive, fascinating, and tragic in equal parts, and in both style and substance it reminds us that the cold hard facts of medical science are never separate from humanity, or from our prejudices, or from our most intimate stories. “Pathogens don’t care about bank accounts, national boundaries, or tax returns,” writes Hernández, “and yet government policies about race, class, and citizenship determine who gets to see a doctor and who gets treatment—in the simplest and scariest terms, who gets to live or die.” Put more simply and personally, “migration and poverty swallowed parts of the story.”

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The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease

By Daisy Hernández

Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases. Even into her thirties, she only knew that her aunt had died of Chagas, a rare and devastating illness that affects the heart and digestive system. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas--or the kissing bug disease--is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus.

After her aunt's death, Hernández began searching for answers. Crisscrossing the country, she interviewed patients, doctors, epidemiologists, and even veterinarians with the Department of Defense. She learned that in the United States more than three hundred thousand people in the Latinx community have Chagas, and that outside of Latin America, this is the only country with the native insects--the "kissing bugs"--that carry the Chagas parasite.

Through unsparing, gripping, and humane portraits, Hernández chronicles a story vast in scope and urgent in its implications, exposing how poverty, racism, and public policies have conspired to keep this disease hidden. A riveting and nuanced investigation into racial politics and for-profit healthcare in the United States, The Kissing Bug reveals the intimate history of a marginalized disease and connects us to the lives at the center of it all.

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The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease Hardcover – 1 Jun. 2021

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Who does the United States take care of, and who does it leave behind? A necessary investigation of infectious disease, poverty, racism, and for-profit healthcare-and the harm caused by decades of neglect.

Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases. Even into her thirties, she only knew that her aunt had died of Chagas, a rare and devastating illness that affects the heart and digestive system. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas-or the kissing bug disease-is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus.

After her aunt's death, Hernández began searching for answers. Crisscrossing the country, she interviewed patients, doctors, epidemiologists, and even veterinarians with the Department of Defense. She learned that in the United States more than three hundred thousand people in the Latinx community have Chagas, and that outside of Latin America, this is the only country with the native insects-the "kissing bugs"-that carry the Chagas parasite.

Through unsparing, gripping, and humane portraits, Hernández chronicles a story vast in scope and urgent in its implications, exposing how poverty, racism, and public policies have conspired to keep this disease hidden. A riveting and nuanced investigation into racial politics and for-profit healthcare in the United States, The Kissing Bug reveals the intimate history of a marginalized disease and connects us to the lives at the center of it all.

• Print length 336 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Tin House Books
• Publication date 1 Jun. 2021
• Dimensions 14.73 x 2.79 x 22.35 cm
• ISBN-10 1951142527
• ISBN-13 978-1951142520
• See all details

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About the author.

Daisy Hernández is a former reporter for The New York Times and has been writing about the intersections of race, immigration, class, and sexuality for almost two decades. She has written for National Geographic , NPR's All Things Considered and Code Switch , The Atlantic , Slate , and Guernica , and she's the former editor of Colorlines , a newsmagazine on race and politics. Hernández is the author of the award-winning memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed and co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism . She is an associate professor at Miami University in Ohio.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tin House Books (1 Jun. 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1951142527
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1951142520
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14.73 x 2.79 x 22.35 cm
• 345 in Central & South American Historical Biographies
• 2,740 in Medical Biographies

About the author

Daisy hernández.

Daisy Hernández is a former reporter for The New York Times and has been writing about the intersections of race, immigration, class, and sexuality for almost two decades. She has written for National Geographic, NPR's All Things Considered and CodeSwitch, The Atlantic, Slate, and Guernica, and she's the former editor of Colorlines, a newsmagazine on race and politics. Daisy is the author of the award-winning memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed and co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism. She is an associate professor at Miami University in Ohio.

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The Kissing Bug

Daniel scott buck.

116 pages, Paperback

First published September 22, 2008

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The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease (Hardcover)

Description

Winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award

National Book Foundation Science + Literature Selection

Finalist for New American Voices Award and Lammy Award for Bisexual Nonfiction

A TIME, NPR, Chicago Public Library, Science for the People, WYNC, WBUR Radio Boston, and The Stacks Podcast Best Book of the Year

Longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award 

As heard on Fresh Air

Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases. Even into her thirties, she only knew that her aunt had died of Chagas, a rare and devastating illness that affects the heart and digestive system. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas—or the kissing bug disease—is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus. 

After her aunt’s death, Hernández began searching for answers. Crisscrossing the country, she interviewed patients, doctors, epidemiologists, and even veterinarians with the Department of Defense. She learned that in the United States more than three hundred thousand people in the Latinx community have Chagas, and that outside of Latin America, this is the only country with the native insects—the “kissing bugs”—that carry the Chagas parasite.

Through unsparing, gripping, and humane portraits, Hernández chronicles a story vast in scope and urgent in its implications, exposing how poverty, racism, and public policies have conspired to keep this disease hidden. A riveting and nuanced investigation into racial politics and for-profit healthcare in the United States,  The Kissing Bug  reveals the intimate history of a marginalized disease and connects us to the lives at the center of it all.

About the Author

Daisy Hernández  is a former reporter for  The New York Times  and has been writing about the intersections of race, immigration, class, and sexuality for almost two decades. She has written for  National Geographic , NPR’s  All Things Considered  and  Code Switch ,  The Atlantic , Slate , and Guernica , and she’s the former editor of  Colorlines , a newsmagazine on race and politics. Hernández is the author of the award-winning memoir  A Cup of Water Under My Bed  and co-editor of  Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism . She is an associate professor at Miami University in Ohio.

Praise For…

• Social Science / Sociology / Urban
• Biography & Autobiography / Medical (incl. Patients)
• Health & Fitness / Diseases & Conditions / Nervous System (incl. Brain)
• Kobo eBook (June 1st, 2021): $17.95
• Paperback (July 19th, 2022): $17.95
• MP3 CD (August 31st, 2021): $29.95
• Compact Disc (August 31st, 2021): $32.95

ⓒ 2024 Foreword Magazine, Inc. All rights reserved.

• Book Reviews
• Foreword Reviews
• Science / Social Science

The Kissing Bug

A true story of a family, an insect, and a nation's neglect of a deadly disease.

Daisy Hernández Tin House ( Jun 1, 2021 ) Hardcover $336.00 ( 336pp ) 978-1-951142-52-0

In The Kissing Bug , Daisy Hernández recounts watching her aunt die from a little known or understood disease. Years later, Hernández set out to learn more, and entered into a harrowing medical mystery.

Hernández’s memories of her aunt depict a vibrant, independent woman who was undone by an illness that her doctors could not easily identify. That infectious disease was Chagas, and Hernández writes that there are more than 300,000 cases in the US’s Latinx population alone, with six million cases total worldwide (most are in South America). She delivers such information in clear terms, but also with a sense of urgency, as when she covers how Chagas is transmitted: nocturnal insects bite at the lips and eyes of their sleeping victims, transferring parasites that colonize and devour human organs from the inside out, affecting the heart and sometimes the digestive system. Hernández describes seeing the thrashing parasites under a microscope; it’s a bone-chilling scene.

Written with compassion, but also drawing on interviews and extensive research, the book strikes political and sociological notes, revealing ugly truths about how the medical system responds in different ways to well-off patients and high-profile disorders, electing to overlook less glamorous diseases that affect poorer, more vulnerable populations, where the afflicted are less likely to arouse compassion.

Hernández asserts that there are no easy answers when it comes to Chagas. Even her aunt—who was a teacher, had health insurance for much of the time she was ill, and got medical treatment from qualified doctors—was not cured, because she did not receive a timely diagnosis or treatment.

The Kissing Bug is the engrossing account of a family medical mystery that led to a compassionate investigation of an underattended disease.

Reviewed by Susan Waggoner May / June 2021

Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.

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THE KISSING BUG

A true story of a family, an insect, and a nation's neglect of a deadly disease.

Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases. Even into her thirties, she only knew that her aunt had died of Chagas, a rare and devastating illness that affects the heart and digestive system. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas—or the kissing bug disease—is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus.

After her aunt’s death, Hernández began searching for answers.

more …

After her aunt’s death, Hernández began searching for answers. Crisscrossing the country, she interviewed patients, doctors, epidemiologists, and even veterinarians with the Department of Defense. She learned that in the United States more than three hundred thousand people in the Latinx community have Chagas, and that outside of Latin America, this is the only country with the native insects—the “kissing bugs”—that carry the Chagas parasite.

Through unsparing, gripping, and humane portraits, Hernández chronicles a story vast in scope and urgent in its implications, exposing how poverty, racism, and public policies have conspired to keep this disease hidden. A riveting and nuanced investigation into racial politics and for-profit healthcare in the United States,  The Kissing Bug  reveals the intimate history of a marginalized disease and connects us to the lives at the center of it all.

• Tin House Books
• 9781953534194

Buy the Book

• About the Author

Discussion Questions

About daisy hernández.

Author Website

Winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award National Book Foundation Science + Literature Selection Finalist for New American Voices Award and Lammy Award for Bisexual Nonfiction A TIME, NPR, Chicago Public Library, Science for the People, WYNC, WBUR Radio Boston, and The Stacks Podcast Best Book of the Year Longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award As heard on Fresh Air

“An absolutely essential perspective on global migration, poverty, and pandemics.” —Amy Stewart, author of  Wicked Bugs

“Lyrical, unflinching. . . . Hernández expertly skates the line between memoir and science tome, showing the personal effects of a disease perpetuated by a cascade of systemic failures.” — The Washington Post

“A necessary read for anyone concerned about health crises across the world.” — The Boston Globe

“Part memoir, part investigative thriller. . . . Her book shines a light on [a] neglected harm.” — The San Francisco Chronicle

“A common but overlooked parasite killed the author’s aunt, spurring this exposé.” — The New York Times  Book Review, New & Noteworthy

“Visceral. . . . [Hernández] weaves storytelling, science and policy with striking results.” — Newsweek

1. Had you heard of Chagas disease before reading this book? Were there things you learned about that surprised you?

2. Danielle Ofri calls The Kissing Bug “a deft mix of family archaeology, parasite detective story, and American reckoning.” In a few words, how would you characterize the book?

3. How was the book structured? How did this affect the story and your appreciation of the book?

4. Author Daisy Hernández begins the narrative in childhood, with a scene of her aunt in the hospital. Why do you think she chose to start in this way?

5. “While other girls my age were taught to fear rabid dogs and horrible men,” says Hernández, “I learned to be terrified of an insect the size of my fingernail, an insect that could kill a woman’s heart. And as with all private mythologies, this one began before my mother was born.” Growing up, was there anything that your family’s particular history taught you to fear?

6. Says Hernández: “The corazón, the heart, is an accordion. . . . The kissing bug disease tampers with this music.” How does she use metaphor and other techniques here and elsewhere to help explain complicated medical and scientific concepts? Why might she, at times, be writing in this way, rather than using more technical terminology?

7. Of all the patients Hernández interviews in the book, was there one you connected with most? Why do you think it was important to Hernández to include so many individual stories?

8. Angie Cruz says that “The question The Kissing Bug investigates is timely: Who does the United States take care of, and who does it leave behind?” After reading the book, how would you answer this question?

9. In your opinion, could more be done to educate the American public about Chagas disease? What kinds of steps might be taken?

10. If you could recommend this book to anyone in the world, who would you share it with? Who do you think most needs to read these pages?

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The kissing bug: a true story of a family, an insect, and a nation's neglect of a deadly disease (hardcover).

Description

Winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award

National Book Foundation Science + Literature Selection

Finalist for New American Voices Award and Lammy Award for Bisexual Nonfiction

A TIME, NPR, Chicago Public Library, Science for the People, WYNC, WBUR Radio Boston, and The Stacks Podcast Best Book of the Year

Longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award 

As heard on Fresh Air

Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases. Even into her thirties, she only knew that her aunt had died of Chagas, a rare and devastating illness that affects the heart and digestive system. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas—or the kissing bug disease—is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus. 

After her aunt’s death, Hernández began searching for answers. Crisscrossing the country, she interviewed patients, doctors, epidemiologists, and even veterinarians with the Department of Defense. She learned that in the United States more than three hundred thousand people in the Latinx community have Chagas, and that outside of Latin America, this is the only country with the native insects—the “kissing bugs”—that carry the Chagas parasite.

Through unsparing, gripping, and humane portraits, Hernández chronicles a story vast in scope and urgent in its implications, exposing how poverty, racism, and public policies have conspired to keep this disease hidden. A riveting and nuanced investigation into racial politics and for-profit healthcare in the United States,  The Kissing Bug  reveals the intimate history of a marginalized disease and connects us to the lives at the center of it all.

About the Author

Daisy Hernández  is a former reporter for  The New York Times  and has been writing about the intersections of race, immigration, class, and sexuality for almost two decades. She has written for  National Geographic , NPR’s  All Things Considered  and  Code Switch ,  The Atlantic , Slate , and Guernica , and she’s the former editor of  Colorlines , a newsmagazine on race and politics. Hernández is the author of the award-winning memoir  A Cup of Water Under My Bed  and co-editor of  Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism . She is an associate professor at Miami University in Ohio.

Praise For…

• Social Science / Sociology / Urban
• Biography & Autobiography / Medical (incl. Patients)
• Health & Fitness / Diseases & Conditions / Nervous System (incl. Brain)
• Kobo eBook (June 1st, 2021): $17.95
• Paperback (July 19th, 2022): $17.95
• MP3 CD (August 31st, 2021): $29.95
• Compact Disc (August 31st, 2021): $32.95

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