The author’s vituperation may alienate some, and her voluminous statistics may turn off others, but her demand that...
A disturbing picture of the status of AIDS in the United States and an angry claim that the country has failed utterly to confront the problem.
Hunter, a medical anthropologist who has previously written on the specter of AIDS in Africa and Asia, asserts not only that the United States has the most severe HIV epidemic of any developed country but that AIDS will soon become the worst epidemic this country will ever know. Most Americans, she says, are woefully ignorant about AIDS, still thinking of it as something that affects homosexuals and drug users, but not themselves or the people they know. To counteract this notion, she focuses on the story of Paige Swanberg, a white, middle-class woman from Montana who learned that she was HIV-positive when she tried to join the Navy and has since become an AIDS counselor. Hunter also interviewed a number of other activists and people touched by AIDS, and her text is heavily larded with their comments, some pertinent but many not. She is particularly scornful of the Christian Right, deploring its abstinence-only approach to sex education and its disinformation campaign about condoms, and she has harsh words for the Bush administration for catering to their demands. The government, she claims, has failed to protect citizens through acts of commission and omission: e.g., its “war on drugs,” with a mass-incarceration approach that promotes the spread of AIDS, as crowded prisons becoming ideal breeding grounds for drug-resistant superstrains of HIV; its cuts in funding for treatment programs; its attacks on women’s reproductive rights; its withdrawal of support for housing and food for HIV-positive Americans. Hunter is clearly outraged by what she sees, and her language reflects her wrath: a government that “doesn’t seem to give a damn”; “right-wing hatemongers” and “vote-buying liberals”; and a drug industry with a “stranglehold” on government.
The author’s vituperation may alienate some, and her voluminous statistics may turn off others, but her demand that attention be paid comes through loud and clear.Pub Date: March 28, 2006
ISBN: 1-4039-7199-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
As with nearly all of Lewis’ books, this one succeeds on so many levels, including as a well-written primer on how the...
Lewis (The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds, 2016, etc.) turns timely political reporting he published in Vanity Fair into a book about federal government bureaucracies during the first year of the Donald Trump presidency.
At first, the author’s curiosity about the relationship between individual citizens and massive federal agencies supported by taxpayer dollars did not lead him to believe the book would become a searing indictment of Trump. However, Lewis wisely allowed the evidence to dictate the narrative, resulting in a book-length indictment of Trump’s disastrous administration. The leading charge of the indictment is what Lewis terms “willful ignorance.” Neither Trump nor his appointees to head government agencies have demonstrated even the slightest curiosity about how those agencies actually function. After Trump’s election in November 2016, nobody from his soon-to-be-inaugurated administration visited federal agencies despite thorough preparation within those agencies to assist in a traditionally nonpartisan transition. Lewis primarily focuses on the Energy Department, the Agriculture Department, and the Commerce Department. To provide context, he contrasts the competent transition teams assembled after the previous elections of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Displaying his usual meticulous research and fluid prose, the author makes the federal bureaucracy come alive by focusing on a few individuals within each agency with fascinating—and sometimes heartwarming—backstories. In addition, Lewis explains why each of those individuals is important to the citizenry due to their sometimes-arcane but always crucial roles within the government. Throughout the book, unforgettable tidbits emerge, such as the disclosure by a Forbes magazine compiler of the world’s wealthiest individuals list that only three tycoons have intentionally misled the list’s compilers—one of the three is Trump, and another is Wilbur Ross, appointed by Trump as Commerce Secretary.
As with nearly all of Lewis’ books, this one succeeds on so many levels, including as a well-written primer on how the government serves citizens in underappreciated ways.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-324-00264-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
James Baldwin has come a long way since the days of Notes of a Native Son, when, in 1955, he wrote: "I love America more than any other country in the world; and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually." Such bittersweet affairs are bound to turn sour. The first curdling came with The Fire Next Time, a moving memoir, yet shot through with rage and prophetic denunciations. It made Baldwin famous, indeed a celebrity, but it did little, in retrospect, to further his artistic reputation. Increasingly, it seems, he found it impossible to reconcile his private and public roles, his creative integrity and his position as spokesman for his race. Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, for example, his last novel, proved to be little more than a propagandistic potboiler. Nor, alas, are things very much better in No Name In the Street, a brief, rather touchy and self-regarding survey of the awful events of the '60's — the deaths of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, the difficulties of the Black Panther Party, the abrasive and confused relationships between liberals and militants. True, Baldwin's old verve and Biblical raciness are once more heard in his voice; true, there are poignant moments and some surprisingly intimate details. But this chronicle of his "painful route back to engagement" never really comes to grips with history or the self. The revelatory impulse is present only in bits and pieces. Mostly one is confronted with psychological and ideological disingenuousness — and vanity as well.
Pub Date: May 26, 1972
ISBN: 0307275922
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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