Public-health specialist Epstein (Where She Came From, 1997, etc.) takes a stark yet hopeful look at the AIDS epidemic in Africa.
Forty percent of the world’s population infected with HIV live in African countries that are home to only three percent of the world’s population, she states, illustrating the severity of the problem. Trained as a molecular biologist, the author opens with an account of her naïve and frustrated attempts to study HIV in Uganda in 1993. Since then, Epstein has traveled widely in Africa, studying gender relations and developing a theory about the spread of AIDS. She argues that the epidemic has been triggered by upheavals caused by the rapid shift for millions of Africans from an agrarian, tribal society to a semi-urbanized way of life in a bureaucratic state, as well as the consequent disruptive shift in the balance of power between the sexes. She credits Uganda’s homegrown Zero Grazing campaign of the 1980s with reducing the HIV rate more than either abstinence or condoms. The program recognized that polygamy, formal or informal, was the norm, but encouraged men to stick to one partner or, if they must have multiple partners, to avoid casual encounters with prostitutes. According to Epstein, such a program could not operate in the current political and religious climate. AIDS, she maintains, is now a multibillion-dollar enterprise with highly paid outside consultants offering a menu of options that fail to consider the cultures of those they seek to reach. What is needed is not just medical treatment for those already infected, but support for community-based, locally conceived and locally controlled preventive initiatives.
Critical analysis of a dire situation and a compelling argument for the power of social mobilization.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-374-28152-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
Categories: HISTORY | HEALTH & FITNESS | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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