Marmot’s new book, The Health Gap, is informative and witty, inviting the reader to think unconventionally about the nature of the relationship between economic growth and health outcomes. The book presents arresting statistics as well as attention grabbing life stories to make some very important points about the dire implications of inequality for life expectancy and well-being. It is a book that brings together the powerful data on the role played by social and economic hierarchies in determining health outcomes based on research that Marmot has collected over the course of his career, and that were brought to the attention of the larger public through the work of the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health. The subtitle of the book: The Challenge of an Unequal World provides the intellectual terrain that is a necessary requirement to understand why health cannot continue to be regarded as solely a matter of individual choice as the factors that contribute to making an individual live long and well are decided very early on in one’s life, if not in utero and by factors from the local to the global that are beyond individual control