28: Stories of AIDS in Africa
Posted by admin | Posted in Aid | Posted on 01-09-2010
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Product Description
For the past six years, Stephanie Nolen has traced AIDS across Africa, and 28 is the result: an unprecedented, uniquely human portrait of the continent in crisis. Through riveting, anecdotal stories, she brings to life men, women, and children involved in every AIDS arena, making them familiar. And she explores the effects of an epidemic that well exceeds the Black Plague in scope, and the reasons why we must care about what happens.
In every instance, Nolen has borne witness to the stories she relates, whether riding with truck driver Mohammed Ali on a journey across Kenya; following Tigist Haile Michael, a smart, shy fourteen-year-old Ethiopian orphan fending for herself and her baby brother on the slum streets of Addis Ababa; chronicling the efforts of Alice Kadzanja, an HIV-positive nurse in Malawi; or interviewing Nelson Mandela’s family about coming to terms with his own son’s death from AIDS. Nolen’s stories reveal how the disease works and spreads; how it is inextricably tied to conflict and famine and to the diverse cultures it has ravaged; how treatment works, and how people who can’t get treatment fight to stay alive with courage and dignity against huge odds.
Imagine the entire population of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles combined infected with HIV, and its magnitude in Africa is clear. Writing with power and simplicity, Stephanie Nolen makes us listen, allows us to understand, and inspires us to care. Timely and transformative, 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa is essential reading for anyone concerned about the fate of humankind.
“Stephanie Nolen, a journalist for the Toronto Globe and Mail, gives us 28 moving stories of daily life in AIDS-devastated Africaone for every million Africans who are HIV-positive. These stories offer astonishing glimpses of the people of a continent brought to its knees . . . Nolen is a pro; in the dankest wattle hut, you sense the notepad at the ready.”D.T. Max, Newsday
“Nolen is a gifted listener and storyteller . . . Her collection . . . pays loving tribute to the people of Africa . . . Although history and science are woven lightly in and around the anecdotes and photographic portraits of the 28, this is a book about human life and human nature.”The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
“Stephanie Nolen looks behind the facts and stats to talk to 28 people across the continent affected by the virus. Through them, she builds up a larger narrative: of mass social stigma and ignorance; corrupt governments; exploitative drug companies; and a dispassionate and largely disinterested West. A welcome dispatch from an epic disaster we ignore at our peril.”Metro (London)
“In 28, Nolen marshals the reporting and storytelling skills that have made her, after UN special envoy Stephen Lewis, this country’s most compelling and vigorous voice for action on the grim parasite worming its way across Africa. In clear, insightful prose and vivid, though never lurid, detail, she allows her charactersone for every million peopleto tell tales of despair and remarkable courage, willful ignorance and improbable triumph.”The Gazette (Montreal)
“A kind of continental survey of the impact of the AIDS pandemic on Africa, in stories that are frequently both tragically sad and just as often hugely inspiring.”Calgary Herald
“[Nolen] is an evocative and empathetic writer.”The Nation
“Magnificent, inspiring, informative. Nolen opens the essential door to the brave, suffering, human reality of the African AIDS crisis.”John le Carré
“This book is magnificent. It’s probably the best book ever written about AIDS, certainly the best I’ve ever read. I wept when I finished, not just because it’s beautifully written, not just because the last chapter tears the heart out, not just because it’s a work of such force and feeling and power, not just because it’s so intensely and astonishingly human, not just because it covers the entire landscape of the virus, but because its impact could shape public opinion as never before.”Stephen Lewis, former UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa
“If a war had killed 20 million soldiers, and left 28 million more dying of wounds, we’d call it the worst such tragedy since World War II. This is the scale of AIDS in Africa. Stephanie Nolen brings this story to life in a moving, deeply human way. Through these portraitsshrewdly chosen, varied, and sometimes startlingly unexpectedshe artfully puts a series of human faces on the greatest health crisis of our time.”Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost and Bury the Chains
“28 can soon be 48, 98 and more. And not just in Africa. And it does not have to be. Nolen shows that the struggle of one to live with dignity must be the struggle of all. Read. Weep. Rage. And above all elselike those people described in this brilliant bookfind the courage to do.”Dr. James Orbinski, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Médecins Sans Frontières
“A book of quiet yet overwhelming power, delivering a message of devastating moral authority. Moving, heartrending and uplifting, Stephanie Nolen’s book bears impeccable witness to the unique and savage’ phenomenon of AIDS in Africa.”William Boyd, author of Restless and Brazzaville Beach
“AIDS in Africa is an enigma. The more it spreads, the less we see it. It is deadly yet deniable. It hides in full view of everyone. What this moving book does is to catch it by the tail and show us its faceit is our own.”Christopher Hope, author of My Mother’s Lovers
“This is a formidable book of record . . . from the tiny virus, via 28 individual human stories, to an entire continent. The stories will tear you apart before putting you back together, fully-armed and ready to go to war with a virus more dangerous than any W.M.D.”Bono
“Essential reading in the Age of AIDS, it is never earnest, and, whilst often painful, full of humane and painstakingly researched detail.”Emma Thompson
“Nolen puts a very human face on HIV/AIDS in Africa, verbally and visually. A photograph accompanies each of the book’s 28 personal histories (one subject stands for one million infected people in sub-Saharan Africa). The faces in the photos appear no different than faces of everyday Americans, but that appearance belies the horrific reality of lives shredded by devastating disease. The stories, ranging from those of orphaned children on their own, struggling to keep from being raped by adult neighbors, to that of an HIV-positive beauty queen, couldn’t be more illustrative of the dissimilarity of Africa to North America. To cite one example, there is 12-year-old Lefa Khoele, stuck in grade 3 because every year he has been too sick to take end-of-year exams. His is a common situation for infected African children. Nolen sees beneath the surfaces of these individuals, estranged and all but destroyed by governmental ineptitude and denial, and evinces their loves and hopes and family ties, their humanness, with which all others can identify.”Booklist
“Nolen gives the epidemic a human facemore precisely, 28 human faces, one for each million Africans estimated to be infected with HIV. Ill healthcare workers and activists are portrayed along with ordinary Africans whose lives have been forever changed by AIDS. Nolen tells their stories simply and elega…
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