Free PDF Our Kind of People: A Continent's Challenge, A Country's Hope, by Uzodinma Iweala
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Our Kind of People: A Continent's Challenge, A Country's Hope, by Uzodinma Iweala
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Review
“At last, an account of the AIDS crisis from the point of view of the people most affected by it—men, women and children of Africa, who are not simply victims but are heroes and scientists as well.” (The Daily Beast)“A stunning inquiry into the AIDS crisis in sub-Saharan Africa. . . . Iweala evokes the human cost of AIDS, and this is where Our Kind of People excels. . . . . Iweala’s focus on narrative, on sharing voices and experiences, becomes an act of redemption.” (The Los Angeles Times Book Review)“Iweala’s arguments are well reasoned. By making generous use of the voices of many Africans, Iweala’s writing possesses an immediacy that makes his message powerful and compelling.” (The Boston Globe)“Iweala tells the stories of those whose lives - and deaths - make up the numbers in a measured, accessible tone. The end of the story of HIV/AIDS is not yet written, but in Our Kind of People we see the beginnings of normalcy.” (Bono)“In this unassuming but important book, Uzodinma Iweala gives the AIDS pandemic not just a human face but a human voice. . . . Remarkable.” (The Times Literary Supplement)
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From the Back Cover
HIV/AIDS has been reported as one of the most destructive diseases in recent memory, tearing apart communities and ostracizing the afflicted. But the emphasis placed on death and despair hardly captures the many and varied effects of the epidemic, or the stories of the extraordinary people who live and die under its watch. On a remarkable journey through his native Nigeria, Uzodinma Iweala opens our minds to these stories, speaking with people from all walks of life: the ill and the healthy, doctors, nurses, sex workers, students, parents, and children. Their testimonies are by turns uplifting, alarming, humorous, and always unflinchingly candid.At once a deeply personal exploration of life in the face of disease and an incisive critique of our ideas of health and happiness, Our Kind of People goes behind the headlines to illuminate the scope of the crisis and the real lives it affects.
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Product details
Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial (July 9, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780061284915
ISBN-13: 978-0061284915
ASIN: 0061284912
Product Dimensions:
5.3 x 0.6 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.8 out of 5 stars
24 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#1,788,612 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Not giving this short look at AIDS in Africa (and specifically, the experience in Nigeria, the author's home country) more than three stars feels a bit churlish. But however moving the individual stories it contains may be, the book itself is far from flawless.My principal problem with the narrative surfaced early on, when Iweala makes the case that the West has a difficulty in understanding Africa's AIDS crisis because we are blinkered by ages-old prejudices. Certainly, those prejudices exist, especially among those who have never spent any time in sub-Saharan Africa. But Iweala then proceeds to undermine his own case by showing that many of these preconceptions may have some basis in reality. For instance, he discusses the nature of sexual relationships as being more likely to be concurrent than consecutive (he talks to a man who defines fidelity to a girlfriend as cutting the number of his other girlfriends from eight down to four, and then only to one other woman, for instance.) Forget labels and judgments: as Iweala and the physicians he talks to for this book comment, that kind of approach is more likely to result in the kind of dramatic spread of AIDS that the world has witnessed in Africa. He doesn't want traditional African beliefs criticized -- and yet some of those, too, have negatively affected the lives of Nigerians with AIDS, as they are excluded from the community and shunned our of a kind of fear that AIDS is spread via some kind of miasma.Where does the line lie between the West patronizing Africans by offering assistance and offending them by not doing enough? Iweala refers to African HIV/AIDS activists and their belief that Westerners don't see African AIDS patients "as similar to ourselves and thus deserving of proper medical care." What popped into my mind at that point was the number of Americans I've encountered who view their fellow Americans (of any color) in a similar way: anyone imprudent enough not to provide for health emergencies isn't their responsibility, I've heard it argued. This is a human issue, not simply a West/Africa issue, sadly, although in the case of Africa it may be complicated by history. Still, it isn't specific to Africa; similar perceptions have taken root in Asia at times.I didn't expect Iweala to provide answers to any of these very difficult questions that lie at the heart of the relationship between Africa and the West -- but given that he raised them, I was disappointed he adopted what struck me as a narrower view. Had the core narrative been stronger, these issues wouldn't have niggled at the back of my mind as they did. Are the portraits of the Nigerians who are battling the disease moving and compelling? Absolutely. Are the tales inspiring. Certainly. Is Iweala's core message -- that we should see each other, positive or negative, African or Western, as humans first and foremost -- important? Without question. Of course we must work to cross these boundaries. But I wonder whether the people who will read this book and respond to that message have already accepted this? How many North Americans and Europeans -- those who are willing to listen -- are going to find that at all revelatory or fresh? Perhaps it's true, however, that some of those observations that I found to be self-evident -- that we all should help those struggling with HIV to simply lead their lives -- are those that bear the most repetition.What this book does do well is to provide readers with a compelling oral history of AIDS in Nigeria. The portraits of the individuals Iweala encounters are vivid and he does a great job of blending their stories with the necessary facts and figures. Nonetheless, Still, this book didn't accomplish nearly what it could have. By brushing away the difficult questions -- dismissing a CNN story of a town of AIDS orphaned children in Kenya as melodramatic (fair comment) and as being about Kenya and thus irrelevant because Africa is more than just Kenya (well, Kenya is a part of Africa... and the village did exist...) -- Iweala undermined some of what he otherwise accomplished in my eyes.This probably won't be a majority view, and that's probably just as well, as this is certainly a powerfully human book that deserves readers. Nonetheless, I remain underwhelmed.
I lost my best friend to AIDS in 1989, and I still miss him terribly. For years I was terrified of making friends with gay men for fear of losing them. I had lost three friends, and until the anti-retro viral treatments were available, I was worried all the time that other friends would be taken from me. After the cocktail that worked was readily available, my fears dissipated and now I have two friends with HIV/Aids who happily live their lives fully, without the fear (on their part or mine) that they will die a premature death. I've seen the fear it inspires, first hand, how some family members react and how miserable self-righteous prigs see this disease as a punishment from God. But, that was a generation ago. To read a book written today, that details all the crap people had to go thru who had HIV/Aids thirty years ago, as if it were breaking news, is mind numbing. I have known about the devastation HIV/Aids has caused to millions of people in different countries in Africa for almost as long as I knew about it here.Iweala wrote this book as if it's a relatively new phenomena that needs to be addressed. C'mon. Wake up. This is not new or news. What is important is how millions of people in Africa are denied treatments because of either cost or inaccessibility to locations that administer treatments (the latter situation wasn't even addressed in this book).There are snippets in this book that are compelling, but mostly it is dated material, poorly and very defensively written. Iweala constantly bemoans how we clump all the people and all the countries in Africa together and make grotesque generalizations. Make that point and move on.I did, however, love the title of the book. Essentially, it asks, who gets HIV/Aids. And the answer is: People like us. Viewing the crisis that way keeps us from treating those people who are positive as "the other".
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