AIDS: The Women

This is a remarkable collection of short, personal essays on the modern plague of AIDS by an international group of women. "I don't have the virus but I have the disease. . . . It's a disease that tells people about Tom's past and therefore mine. I feel tainted and ashamed," states the resentful wife of an AIDS patient. But most of the anger in this volume is directed toward lethargic government and unresponsive public-health policies. "I often wonder if this isn't another Holocaust," writes an infected heterosexual woman who had had only three lovers in the past 14 years. "It's just like before everyone knew . . . but chose to just sit back and ignore it." And while a physician discovers that ice cream, sunshine and a shopping trip sometimes are valuable prescriptions, a health educator learns to "talk dirty," sans flinching. Without raising a specter of imminent death, terrifying but informative statistics are dropped; without limning grotesque details, pain is communicated often with a dose of humor. The editors are freelance journalists.

In the chapter “A Report from the Front Lines”, Garrett compared the tragedies women faced coping with AIDS in their families in Newark, NJ and Bukoba, Tanzania.

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