AIDS in America

by Susan Hunter

Book Overview

With more than one million people currently infected and half a million already dead, the U.S. ranks among the top ten most severe AIDS epidemics in the world. Americans should know more about the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1403971994
• ISBN13: 9781403971999
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.7" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Emerging AIDS Pandemic Given Necessary Spotlight in Highly Personalized Book

Even with the majesty of the recent HBO production of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" still fresh in our collective psyches, it is astounding how this plague continues to spread unabated. In fact, it seems to be going undercover yet again at a time when a new surge of HIV is most definitively on its way. The palpable danger of HIV/AIDS comes to searing life in medical anthropologist Susan Hunter's blistering book, the third she has tackled on this subject (the first two dealing with the AIDS epidemics in Africa and Asia). While she can get somewhat didactic, her points are well supported, the most significant being that our social, political, and economic systems have been deeply compromised by fundamentalist Christian doctrine. The statistics are shocking yet inevitable once it becomes clear how half-hearted efforts have been to thwart the disease. According to the Center for Disease Control, between 2002 and 2003, the U.S. experienced a surge in new HIV infections and crossed the million milestone in 2005. Yet, it's the human face that Hunter brings to AIDS that makes her book resonate as deeply as it does. She has developed a heartbreaking narrative primarily derived from extensive interviews she held with Tom and Paige Swanberg of Billings, Montana and their families. Through Tom's infection, they become the vehicle by which we recognize the intractable connection points among the various religious, political, economic, and social forces that have actually increased the number of AIDS cases here. While the personal impact of the Swanbergs highlights both strengths and weaknesses in character that Hunter documents in moving detail, there is also the not-so-startling revelation of an enormous and fatally flawed political system and medial infrastructure dictated by ignorance and presumptive thinking. The exploitation of the epidemic has been sadly seen by some as an excuse to manifest their greed and allow the public to live in fantasy about the current state of disease. What has resulted is a shift in the chief demographic of HIV/AIDS from an exclusively male populace toward the perceived fringes, specifically teenagers who are too young to know about the first outbreak in the 1980's and aging baby boomers who think they are part of a pre-AIDS generation. In fact, one of the most poignant stories in the book is about Susan Howe, a sixty-year-old Pittsburgh activist infected ten years ago in a brutal rape. As always, there is the prevalent perception that AIDS is the disease of gays and addicts, and the government is more than willing to support this misconception to support their own agenda. The newest victims, according to Hunter, have been deliberately provided with misinformation, and once infected, they become promptly ignored by the system that s supposed to help them. Tom's story, in particular, is a much-needed wake-up call about the importance of discriminating behavior and self-protection. Hunter does provide hope through examp