By now we are all familiar with the AIDS crisis as it exists in the United States, but the severity of the crisis in Africa dwarfs its American cousin. The HIV rate for people aged 15–49 in the United States has never exceeded 1 percent, whereas the South African rate as of the end of 2005 was 18.8 percent, according to UNICEF. Critics of the exceptional attention given to AIDS have noted that malaria, tuberculosis, and problems unrelated to health may have more efficient solutions, but the presence of such problems does not in any way reduce the significance of the AIDS crisis. When nearly one-fifth of a population will be killed by a disease, that epidemic deserves analysis, no matter how large rival problems may be.
For this reason, Helen Epstein’s The Invisible Cure is an important book. Epstein’s stated goal is to explain “why we are losing the fight against AIDS in Africa” while we seem to be winning the same fight in the West. Neither covert racism nor oversimplification plague Epstein’s explanation, though both dominate similar attempts to identify the causes of Africa’s exceptional susceptibility to the HIV virus. A few of the many qualities of Epstein’s argument and the book itself deserve individual mention.
First, Epstein deserves great credit for writing a broadly based and integrative analysis of the AIDS crisis. Though trained mainly as a microbiologist, Epstein draws many critical insights from various fields of social science, including economics, social psychology, and public health theory. Without these insights, Epstein’s argument would have inevitably oversimplified the problems with AIDS relief in Africa, probably laying blame entirely on the shoulders of American drug companies. Epstein’s remarkable skill for integration dramatically improves her argument, to the point that it seems unlikely that she missed any valuable information.
Epstein also exhibits a talent for analysis, perhaps because of her initial training as a scientist. This talent seems to apply independently of the nature of the problem in question; whether she is explaining the failure of a large research project, the family structures that enable HIV to spread, or the reasons why various vaccines have not worked Epstein carefully and clearly breaks the problem down into more intelligible fragments. Though Epstein does not apply this treatment to her own argument, instead presenting its components in no particular order and without a clear explanation of their interconnectedness, the analyses at the heart of her argument seem so well reasoned that her conclusions are irresistible.
Yet another quality of The Invisible Cure is that Epstein mixes and combines narrative with theory in a way that is both rhetorically and logically compelling. She connects every principle she presents to examples from the real world, and every story she tells connects explicitly to some important cause of Africa’s AIDS crisis. The single story of Epstein’s initial scientific research into the AIDS virus as it exists in Africa illustrates a number of principles, including the difficulty with finding a scientific solution; the reasons that many AIDS research and relief projects fail miserably; and the problems with the attitudes of physicians, researchers, and health staff who work with AIDS patients.
Finally, the language itself of The Invisible Cure is generally concise and always clear. Coupled with Epstein’s narratives, the simplicity and pace of the writing make for a very fast and consistently interesting read. Few will find The Invisible Cure easy to put down, or difficult to pick up, as nonfiction can sometimes be.
Epstein’s integrative, analytical, narrative, and rhetorical skills are the most important among many qualities exhibited in The Invisible Cure. When one author exhibits so many qualities in a book about such an important topic, that book tends to become a classic in its field. The Invisible Cure is on its way to becoming such a classic, and it deserves the attention of anyone who cares about the monumental difficulties faced by millions of people on a day-to-day basis.
