Word: africa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Africa is filled with fatherless, motherless families like the Daitons. Last week the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and UNICEF released the first detailed count of the number of children left orphaned by AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa: 10 million and rising. In some countries, 10% of children under 15 have been orphaned by AIDS. There may be 30 million more...
...River (Little, Brown), an exhaustive but quite readable tome that is part travelogue, part scientific inquiry, part investigative journalism. Hooper tries to establish what a panel of scientists convened in 1992 could not--that HIV spread from chimps to man in contaminated experimental polio vaccines that were tested in Africa. He comes close--very close--but falls short of the smoking-gun evidence that would put the issue to rest...
Hooper re-creates the early days of polio-vaccine research and weaves this narrative into the story of HIV's origins, which is pretty solid until it hits Africa. HIV can be traced back to bustling villages along the Congo River in the 1950s. From there, however, the story line frays into dozens of related but possibly unconnected threads. Hooper picks up several of these, including, tantalizingly, the fact that the earliest recorded AIDS cases coincide almost perfectly with a map of the polio-vaccine testing sites. But there is no evidence that cells from African chimps were used...
...talent is to unveil revelation. In the nonfiction in this volume, it is Gordimers practice to reveal truths that are painfully obvious to most anybody. The subtitle of the volume is Notes from Our Century, and Gordimer makes a case study of historical progress out of her native South Africa, taking us from the world of apartheid through redemption to the post-apartheid era. But her words begin to sound false: not the falseness of lies, but of emotional untruth...
...spirit. The problem is, this is also the kind of truth that needs to be important to the writer of the kind of nonfiction which Gordimer attempts. It is almost pointless to write journalism about the future of literature, or about the evolution of a truly democratic South Africa, that does not somehow strike a new chord in the reader. Gordimer manages to cover the most emotionally intense period in her countrys histo...