No Time To Lose by Peter Piot

Ebola, AIDS, these are viruses that the mere mention can cause people to become worried and alarmed. While there have been many campaigns to bring awareness to the causes that seek to treat and prevent them, there is still a certain stigma that hangs on to them. Peter Piot, in his work as UNAIDS head, seeks to reducer that stigma and help prevent the spread of AIDS with his work, and wrote this book to accompany those ideas.

Piot started off in medical school with the notion that he wanted to specialize in infectious diseases. And he was told no to bother since they were disappearing from the world. Luckily, he didn't listen, and was on hand to research the first few deadly outbreaks of Ebola and then be a part of the research team for AIDS. His longest work would be with AIDS and he would be a part of several organizations, including USAIDS, throughout his career. The book showed a little of his initial time spent in Zaire working with the Ebola virus and then the larger part of it would be about AIDS and the numerous meetings and people he met to discuss the worldwide effects of the virus.

There are a lot of people in this book. So many that keeping track of them would be absolutely mind boggling and if you didn't know them in real life or hadn't followed them through research papers and other documents, you'd be completely lost. How do I know this? I was completely lost as I didn't know who any of these people were and they were briefly mentioned only to be whisked away again. Piot himself is a clear narrator but while he describes a little bit of his homelife, we only really know his work life, and even that more on the bureaucratic side of things rather than the medical work with actual patients.

This book alternated between being fascinating and boring. The first part, where Piot is working with the Ebola virus, is the interesting part. He details the symptoms, how it was spreading through the population and what they were trying to do to treat it and stop its progression. There are some parts when he is working with AIDS that shares this depth of detail and look into the virus itself. But sadly, the larger portion of this book is devoted to his meetings with people and traveling around trying to defend his organization's actions and other such administrative detail. Unless you like this sort of paperwork type of writing, it is not interesting in the least. While the work they were all doing is very important, it just didn't translate well to the page and I don't think it helped the cause any. Learning about the disease and the people effected by it (personal stories of the people) would have been much more effective.

This is a memoir though and I can't judge it too harshly on that aspect. This is Piot's life and maybe he wrote it to show everything that he did, rather than make it a tool of awareness for infectious disease. Still, when you go into it thinking it will be about something else, it does disappoint in parts.

No Time to Lose
Copyright 2012
379 pages

Our Kind of People by Uzodinma Iweala

I've read "Beasts of No Nation" and thought it was a good, insightful book.  So when I saw this book by the same author, and saw that it dealt with another hard topic, I decided to give it a try.  And I thought the message he was trying to put out there was worthy, certainly viewing AIDS/HIV in a different way than it is commonly perceived is a good thing, but I'm not sure if he pulled it off successfully.

In this nonfiction, Iweala travels back and forth between the United States and his family's native country of Nigeria.  Most of this book takes place in Nigeria and centers around the HIV positive people he meets and interviews.  It tells the perception of HIV/AIDS in Nigeria, by the people who have it, people who don't, and just the overall thoughts of the disease.  It also goes a little bit into the different treatments available that makes this disease no longer have a fatal end and also the different campaigns in Nigeria to try to stop the rampant spread of AIDS/HIV.

I thought he was very fair to the people he described in this book.  He told it in a "voice" that seemed authentic and like the stories were actually from the people themselves rather than him completely paraphrasing it.  So in that regards the people here are very real and Iweala is able to tell stories that wouldn't normally be told.  For himself, he is merely the narrator and while he mentions certain things that relate to him and his family, he doesn't really go into why this topic is so important to him other than having worked in that area in medical school.  I guess it would have been nice to really get a feel for why he is so passionate about the subject.

The actual stories from the people he talks to are compelling.  And they are the best part of this book.  Unfortunately though, they are spaced in such a way and included in with so much other information, that reading this book is somewhat exhausting.  It's like holding your breath for a long time while running and then struggling to keep up when you become tired.  I think better spacers and a sense of focus would have helped this book.  The topic of AIDS/HIV is a hard one to write about as there are so many rumors and falsehoods that Iweala is correct in saying that people with HIV are perceived as different or even bad.  But unlike Iweala, I disagree that this focus is on Africans primarily.  I think that a bad stigma is placed on anyone with this disease, regardless of where they live in the world or their access to medicine.  And that it's just as harsh here as it is there.  And while people who aren't promiscuous or share needles get this disease, it shouldn't be ignored that risky behaviors increase the risk of getting the disease.  It's not a cultural problem but rather a personal one as each individual contracts the disease for a different reason.

It's a thought provoking book, and I'm glad that Iweala took the time to show us a look at people in Africa with AIDS/HIV and their perception of the disease.  You might not learn anything new about the disease from this book, but it does help someone relate to the people who have it and recognize that they are not any different from people who don't have it.  A little more focus and this could have been a very outstanding book.

Our Kind of People
Copyright 2012
217 pages