"<i>The Politics of Potential</i> examines a powerful new intervention that seeks to alter the future by tinkering with the present conditions of the unborn. Pentecost provides a riveting and at times dystopian account of how epigenetic interventions layer on to other global health interventions in disadvantaged communities in post-apartheid South Africa. From this laboratory of poverty, will it indeed be possible to finally break the cycle of violence and deprivation into which such communities seem locked?"<br />  

- Vinh-Kim Nguyen, author of The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of AIDS

"This nuanced ethnography of South Africa’s First 1000 Days program offers brilliant insights about how global health’s long-standing obsession with maternal-child health is being reinvented under new scientific demands for epigenetic modeling and their temporal gymnastics in a place with a particularly fraught history of social injustice. Pentecost troubles the simplistic assessment of intervention success and failure by reminding readers of how recognition of a <i>responsibility toward historic injury</i> unveils the individualizing, situated, and justice-effacing effects of such programs."<br />  

- Vincanne Adams, editor of Metrics: What Counts in Global Health