In Deadly Biocultures: The Ethics of Life‐Making (2019), Nadine Ehlers and Shiloh Krupar lead readers through an elegant and illuminating disassembling of the power and knowledge regimes that structure contemporary life in the United States. The authors’ clear explanation of Foucault’s theories and tangible real‐world examples makes this critical analysis of life under neoliberalism accessible to readers unfamiliar with Foucauldian scholarship. They skilfully deconstruct the onto‐epistemological production of discourses to display how neoliberal biomedical logics structure the kinds of relationships that are made culturally and socially available to the self, others, markets, politics and the environment.

The book contends that neoliberal biopolitical discourses are constructed to serve the proliferation of life‐making and are influenced by power relations. While our cultural discourses celebrate the process of ‘making‐live’, they simultaneously obfuscate the deadly effects of these discourses and their governing logics. The central argument of Deadly Biocultures is that the very operations of ‘making‐live’ have deadly consequences, particularly for people who experience marginalisation due to race, class, disability, age, gender, sexuality and other geopolitical factors. They call this deadly life‐making. The concept of deadly life‐making is used to ‘examine the centrality of “letting die” to “making‐live” and the unequal enhancement of life under biopolitics; it insists that we recognise death is always inside life and inextricable from the processes of life‐making’ (p. 4).

The book contains five chapters exploring processes of deadly life‐making within contemporary US biocultures. The first chapter, Hope, explores the historical trajectory of militarising hope in the war against cancer. The authors argue that the focus on life and cure affirming hope diverts resources from caring for those who are dying and obscures cancer’s stratification across race and class. Chapter two, Target, argues that the epistemology of race‐based biomedical targeting positions whiteness as the human norm. Drawing heavily on the work of Du Bois, Ehlers and Krupar explain how targeted healthcare focuses on mitigating the effects of anti‐Black racism rather than dismantling the systems that perpetuate inequity. Additionally, they argue that the development of race‐based drugs, such as the heart medication BiDil, leads to ‘racialized bioeconomics‐ the economic exploitation of the unequal conditions of racial life’ (p. 55).

In Thrive, the authors argue that biomedical and public health interventions that position fatness as an individual failure to thrive negating the structural conditions influencing obesity. Neoliberal biomedical interventions exploit and commodify obesity through their complicity with private industries that profit from selling both high‐calorie fast‐food and weight loss products. Thrive also examines how the life‐making potential of harvesting fat for regenerative medicine represents a new frontier in stem cell research that is only accessible to those who have the privilege to pay for it. The fourth chapter, Secure, explores the biocultures of ageing and decline. The authors argue that the imperative to ‘age well’ and protect the self against age‐related decline is based on a neoliberal biofinacialisation of old age that can have deadly effects. Nursing homes and hospices are described as extrabiomedical environments that are pushed into the 'shadowlands' by economic austerity incentives that expose vulnerable older adults to abandonment and death. Finally, Green explores the neoliberal biopolitical relations of the afterlife of the dead human body and the environmental and social justice effects of ‘greening’ human remains. The authors argue that companies seeking to ‘green’ human remains by reusing body parts or returning the body to nature extract value from human corporality by creating new markets. Further, the ability to choose ‘green’ death practices is reserved for the privileged, while the dark history of disposing of the remains of minority and marginalised populations is obfuscated.

Although some international examples are included from countries such as Canada, Australia, and Mexico, the book has a heavy US focus. Neoliberal biocultures are primarily presented as a US commodity exported internationally; however, it would be interesting to examine the reciprocal exchange of neoliberal ideologies between nation‐states. The book includes many fantastic examples of how biocultures can be used as a site of analysis, and including an even more detailed description of how to use biocultures as a methodology would help students and researchers who have been inspired to take up this form of analysis themselves.

This book contributes to the fields of public health, sociology, critical health psychology, and bioethics. The main themes in Deadly Biocultures are increasingly relevant to everyday life in contemporary western societies. For example, Target provides theoretical support for the abolitionist practices advocated for by the Black Lives Matter movement and the fights against anti‐Black racism and police violence. Additionally, the themes explored in Secure can be mapped onto the devastation that nursing homes in the ‘shadowland’ have experienced during the COVID‐19 pandemic. The possibilities for using biocultures to examine life and death in our contemporary world are boundless.

在《致命的生物文化：生命伦理学》（2019年）中，纳丁·埃勒斯（Nadine Ehlers）和希洛·克鲁帕（Shiloh Krupar）带领读者对构成美国当代生活的力量和知识体系进行优雅而有启发性的分解。作者对福柯的理论和真实的实例的清晰解释，使不熟悉福考学术的读者可以对新自由主义下的生活进行批判性分析。他们巧妙地解构了话语的本体论生产，以展示新自由主义生物医学逻辑如何构建在文化和社会上对自身，他人，市场，政治和环境可用的各种关系。

该书认为，新自由主义的生物政治话语是为服务于繁衍生息的生活而构建的，并受到权力关系的影响。当我们的文化话语庆祝“成活”的过程时，它们同时掩盖了这些话语及其统治逻辑的致命影响。致命生物文化的核心论点是，“生存”的运作本身具有致命的后果，特别是对于由于种族，阶级，残疾，年龄，性别，性别和其他地缘政治因素而被边缘化的人们。他们称这是致命的生命。致命的谋生概念被用来“检验”让生命死”对“谋生”的中心性以及生物政治条件下生活的不平等增长；它坚持认为，我们认识到死亡总是存在于生命之内，是生命过程中不可分割的”（第4页）。

本书包含五章，探讨了当代美国生物文化中致命的生命创造过程。第一章“希望”探讨了抗癌战争中军事希望的历史轨迹。这组作者认为，对生活和治愈方法的关注肯定了希望，这转移了人们对照顾垂死者的资源，并掩盖了种族和阶级之间癌症的分层。第二章目标有人认为，基于种族的生物医学目标论的认识论将白度定位为人类规范。埃勒斯（Ehlers）和克虏伯（Krupar）大量借鉴了杜波依斯（Du Bois）的工作，解释了有针对性的医疗保健如何着重于减轻反黑人种族主义的影响，而不是消除使不平等现象长期存在的系统。此外，他们认为，基于种族的药物（例如心脏药物BiDil）的发展导致“种族化的生物经济学-种族生活条件不平等的经济剥削”（第55页）。

在《Thrive》一书中，作者认为，生物医学和公共卫生干预措施将肥胖定位为否定了个体健康成长，否定了影响肥胖的结构性状况。新自由主义生物医学干预措施通过与肥胖者共谋利用肥胖并使之商品化，而肥胖者通过销售高热量的快餐食品和减肥产品而受益。Thrive还研究了收获脂肪用于再生医学的生命潜力如何代表干细胞研究的新领域，只有那些有能力为此付出代价的人才能使用。第四章，安全探索衰老和衰落的生物文化。作者认为，“衰老”并保护自己免受与年龄有关的衰落的当务之急是基于对老年人的新自由主义生物金融化，这种生物金融化会产生致命的影响。疗养院和疗养院被描述为通过经济紧缩激励措施被推入“阴影区”的生物外医学环境，使脆弱的老年人容易被遗弃和死亡。最后，绿色探索了死者来世的新自由主义生物政治关系以及“绿化”人类遗骸的环境和社会正义影响。作者认为，寻求通过重复利用人体部位或使人体回归自然来“绿化”人类遗体的公司通过创造新市场从人类法人中提取价值。此外，特权人员保留选择“绿色”死亡作法的能力，而处理少数族裔和边缘化人群遗体的黑暗历史却被模糊了。

尽管包括加拿大，澳大利亚和墨西哥等国家的一些国际例子，但该书着重美国。新自由主义生物养殖主要作为美国商品出口到世界各地。然而，研究民族国家之间新自由主义意识形态的相互交流将是有趣的。该书包含许多关于如何将生物培养物用作分析场所的奇妙示例，并且包括有关如何将生物培养物用作方法的更详细的描述，这将有助于受到启发的学生和研究人员自己进行这种分析形式。

本书致力于公共卫生，社会学，重症健康心理学和生物伦理学领域。致命生物文化的主题与当代西方社会的日常生活越来越相关。例如，塔吉特（Target）为“黑人生活问题”运动提倡的废奴主义实践以及与反黑人种族主义和警察暴力的斗争提供了理论支持。此外，Secure中探索的主题可以映射到COVID-19大流行期间“阴影地区”的疗养院遭受的破坏。利用生物文化来检验当代世界的生死的可能性是无限的。