A necessary, freeing essay about the way we think about AIDS, and a sequel to Sontag's ten-year-old Illness as Metaphor. Behind the earlier book lay the fact that Sontag herself had won through a two-and-a-half-year illness with cancer, and come out against gloomy doctors and unhealthy terms used to describe cancer. Much of her attack here on language commonly used to describe AIDS seems at first merely artful, and the reader treads words waiting for something to happen. Does something happen? Well, we find out that using military metaphors to make AIDS plain only makes it more alien: " 'other,' as enemies are in modern war; and the move from demonization of the illness to the attribution of fault to the patient is an inevitable one"; "Cancerphobia taught us the fear of a polluting environment; now we have the fear of polluting people that AIDS anxiety inevitably communicates. Fear of the Communion cup, fear of surgery; fear of contaminated blood, whether Christ's blood or your neighbor's. Life—blood, sexual fluids—is itself the bearer of contamination." AIDS, Sontag avers, extends our inurement to the sense of global annihilation fostered by nuclear arms. It is one more apocalypse, "like the astronomical Third World debt, like overpopulation, like ecological blight. . .Apocalypse is now a long-running serial. . ." Apocalypse-mongering about AIDS, however, only enforces stereotypical thinking, inflicts stigma, suggests the need for state sponsored repression: "We are not being invaded. The body is not a battlefield. The ill are neither unavoidable casualties nor the enemy." Not consoling, not inspiring, not really moving, none of which does it mean to be. And yet Sontag's truth-telling about words blows away myths that darken our attempts to understand the as-yet ungraspable about AIDS.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1988
ISBN: 0312420137
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1988
An idiosyncratic and somewhat incoherent investigation into sex education in the age of AIDS. Patton (English/Temple Univ.) explores our country's response to the AIDS crisis vis-Ö-vis education and prevention, concluding that it is both homophobic and racist. When only the homosexual subculture seemed at risk, contends Patton, little effort was expended by US public health officials on education. Only later, when it became obvious that heterosexuals, too, could become infected with the AIDS virus, was there any concerted effort to prevent its spread. But by identifying AIDS almost exclusively with gay males, public health officials gave heterosexuals a false sense of security, failing to provide ``the tools they needed to evaluate and reduce their own risk of contracting AIDS.'' By denying that their own sons might be engaging in sex with other men or injecting drugs into their veins, policymakers did little to protect their children. They preferred to perceive them as too innocent to engage in risky behavior. And since the homosexual population was considered already at risk, little effort was put into stemming the epidemic among gay youth. Youth of color, Patton states, were also neglected by policy makers, since they were viewed as ``unlikely to change their behavior or escape the environment that marks them as premodern.'' In addition to criticizing our country's approach to sex education, Patton assaults the media for its lack of integrity. She insists, for example, that the teenage sexuality of Ryan White (who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion) was overlooked, while Philadelphia's ``Uncle Eddie'' Savitz was unfairly condemned for transmitting the AIDS virus to large numbers of teenage boys. With its painfully stilted academic prose and suffocating atmosphere of political correctness, Fatal Advice isn't likely to convince those who have seen greater complexity in the matter of AIDS education. (10 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8223-1750-8
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
A riveting, candid, first-person account of one man's encounter with prostate cancer. Every year some 200,000 men in this country are diagnosed with prostate cancer. In 1994, Korda, editor in chief of Simon and Schuster and a master storyteller (The Immortals, 1992, etc.), became one of them. He relates, doctor by doctor, test by test, fear by fear, how it changed his life. Initially referred to Memorial Sloan-Kettering's Prostate Cancer Detection Center in New York City, he began a learning process there that he shares honestly and clearly with readers. After interviewing both a surgeon and a radiologist and listening to the advice of prostate cancer survivors, he opted for surgery at Johns Hopkins. His surgeon was Dr. Patrick Walsh, inventor of a nerve-sparing technique for radical prostatectomy that offered Korda the hope of retaining sexual potency. Following surgery, however, it was not impotence but incontinence, with its stigma and potential for humiliating accidents, that became his major concern. Although Korda is amazingly frank in his discussion of his problems, male readers are likely to find his experiences more reassuring than alarming. Happily, by book's end, some nine months after surgery, he seems to be well on the way to living a normal life. While the book is as difficult to put down as a good thriller, Korda's account is notable for the amount of solid information about prostate cancer that he weaves into this very personal story. In Korda's view, knowledge is power, and he urges all men to learn as much as possible about prostate cancer before it happens to them. Not the final word on prostate cancer detection or treatment, but a great awareness-raiser and highly recommended for any man who has, or has ever had, a prostate. (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44844-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
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