The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS
The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS Books
- ISBN13: 9780393337655
- Shape up: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
“[A] rollicking, eye-opening, hilarious account of the underbelly of international AIDS research.”—Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer As an epidemiologist researching AIDS, Elizabeth Pisani has been caught up with international efforts to halt the disease for fourteen years. With swashbuckling wit, fierce honesty, and more than a small political incorrectness, she dishes on herself and her colleagues as they try to prod reluctant governments to fund HIV prevention for the people who need it most: drug injectors, gay men, sex workers, and johns. With verve and clarity, Pisani shows the general reader how her profession really works; how simple it is to draw incorrect conclusions from “objective” data; and, shockingly, how much money is spent so very terribly. 12 illustrations.
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It’s trying to offer a contrary view in the face of so much enthusiasm, but I feel like it’s vital to add something different to the discussion of this book. I should mention that Pisani and I are rough contemporaries with overlapping time in Asia. I don’t reckon we’ve ever met, although Pisani and I have known and even worked with some of the same people and they generally come across in a way that is recognizable to me. I came to the book via reviews on [...] and elsewhere. The book starts off in a promising way, mixing the private and the professional and avoiding the dreaded “too much in rank.” As the book continues, it becomes more polemical and despite an effort at structure, it starts to lapse into spill of consciousness, with vital issues quickly raised, but with small follow-up and complex issues treated with oversimplification, as in the cases of sex work and poverty. The scholarship is spotty in places (e.g., recent history of sexual mores in Thailand, which had been changing for women even before the HIV epidemic). The scholarship also falls apart in small ways. For example, Pisani places her former employer’s HQ in Washington, DC when, in fact, the DC area presence has been shrinking and the HQ everlastingly has been in North Carolina. I’d been hoping to get more wisdom of whores, but ultimately, it’s too much of Pisani and her own melting down.
The book is puzzling in places. Pisani complains about numbers and the difficulties of measuring HIV cases and risky behavior, but never really enlightens the reader about why this is vital and how people handle soft data. Given her training in demography and epidemiology, she should have been able to do this better than someone who has learned epidemiology on the ground like me. Pisani does things like raise the come forth of non-injection drug use as a driver of HIV epidemics and then never comes back to it. The discussion of sex work rightly questions the motives and the evidence for some efforts directed at trafficking, but ultimately goes overboard in minimizing things like debt burden and the growth of trafficking in some parts of SE Asia. There are similar problems with her treatment of economics. In many of the poorest parts of the world, there is relatively small HIV, but poverty often plays a role, as a driver into sex work and the drug trade and in terms of HIV’s impact on working age populations (particularly in Africa). The tendency to over generalize and to play the role of iconoclast mars much of the book, particularly in the later chapters
Compared with literate researchers like Chris Beyrer or the rare journalist knowledgeable about HIV like Jon Cohen or Randy Shilts, Pisani comes off poorly. As a polemicist, her use of evidence is too easily challenged by someone working in the field. In addition, she fails to communicate the difficulties in predicting where the epidemic will go, how much it will expand, and where it might be contained. The magnitude of the Thai epidemic of the 1990s surprised many people, as did the more recent epidemic among gay men in Thailand. The epidemic has been contained in unlikely places that have unstable or poor infrastructures, even as continuing to devastate in places with relatively functional broadcast health systems. Pisani spent her time in residence in Indonesia, a people with many ingredients for a concentrated epidemic of significant size and yet, it’s unclear from the book or from other evidence, why Indonesia has not experienced the rapid expansion seen in Vietnam or the kind of general populace epidemic that occurred in Thailand during the early 1990s. Even as Pisani provides some discussion of why HIV Africa is different from Asia, she never really clarifies why it varies so much on both continents and her description of Africans having more sex really flies in the face of a lot of data. Explaining the situation in Indonesia, particularly in comparison to Thailand, Vietnam or the Philippines (another people with “ingredients”, but a limited epidemic) would have added greatly to the value of the book.
In the end, it becomes apparent that Pisani became burned out and given the tone of the later chapters, it’s neither humdrum nor something that should be viewed unsympathetically. The later chapters raise issues and concerns but offer no solutions. I would guess that the solution for Pisani was to write a cathartic book and go into consulting work. I wish her well, but I really have distress recommending that anyone read the book.
Rating: 2 / 5
I wasn’t expecting much from this book–the title seemed intentionally provocative to the extreme. I don’t much like it when publishers do that.
But the book itself was very excellent. It’s well-written, and amusing, even though it tackles the enormously sensitive issues of AIDS and prostitution. The author, Elizabeth Pisani is an epidemiologist, and she has worked in some of the most terrible slums in the world.
She doesn’t pull any punches. The writing is gritty and genuine. She discussion realistically about drugs and sex, and how so many people are victims of their own surroundings. The book seems to end abruptly though. It’s nearly 400 pages and I still was left looking for an resolution at the end. But maybe there really isn’t one.
Highly not compulsory. I really loved this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
“The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS,” is a remarkable new book by London-based Elizabeth Pisani. The author, who is an epidemiologist, specializes in HIV scrutiny and protection, and has provided research, analysis and policy advice for UNAIDS, the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank, governments on four continents, and other organizations. Pisani started her work life as an Asia-based journalist; and she brings extensive knowledge of Asia, an impassioned commitment to the eradication of AIDS, and a journalist’s clear, informal writing to the book at hand. It makes for quite a package.
The author formerly wrote for Reuters, and “The Economist;” she is evidently a hands-on sort of gal, who’s been out and about, principally in Asia, spending 14 years trying to figure out how AIDS spreads, and how to stop it. She’s met a fantastic many bureaucrats in her efforts; also a fantastic many whores, and quite a few brothel-keepers, too; her reports back from the front line are fascinatingly factual: despite the ultimate seriousness of her theme, they are entertainingly written, to boot. I wouldn’t have plotting it possible.
She reaches a few surprisingly controversial, at this late date, conclusions: condoms used in sexual intercourse, and clean needles for injecting drug addicts, save lives. She argues hostile to waste, foolishness, and fraud in the effort to beat the disease. She further argues that the way the Western world first became familiar with the disease, largely among the homosexual community, set disease circles and clichés of treatment that do not necessarily apply to society as a whole. Finally, she argues, convincingly to me, at least, that the horrendous swathe AIDS has taken through Africa, laying waste to whole towns and orphaning innumerable children, will not be the way AIDS will spread in other countries. This African pattern has been used to scare the world into greater AIDS awareness, and into donating greater sums of money to fight the epidemic, all to the excellent, she says; nevertheless, she argues, overwhelming political correctness has prevented the AIDS community from acknowledging that the patterns of sexual activity seen in Africa are simply different from those she sees elsewhere.
Well,who’d a thunk it? An entertaining, sincerely educational, accessible, simple-to read book about AIDS, written by a qualified scientist, no less.
Rating: 4 / 5
Its rare to find a page turner in this theme but in this book I found one. This was particularly fascinating for me, given recent experience working in Nigeria and not so recent experience working in Indonesia. The shape of the epidemic is certainly different from place to place and I’m hopeful that future policy interventions on HIV/AIDS take a more people-tailored approach. This book gets into all of these issues, and more, particularly in regards to the lack of focus on prevention over the past few years. Highly not compulsory.
Rating: 5 / 5
Elizabeth Pisani delivers a book that is enjoyable to read, but more significantly, takes topics such as epidemiology and statistics collecting, and makes them fascinating to read. For anyone who read ‘And the Band Played On’ this is a fantastic follow-up to get an thought of what has happened with the AIDS crisis since the 90s, and on an international level. The most fascinating aspect is the spread of the pandemic in Muslim nations, and how this is being addressed. Buy it, read it, get informed.
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary EditionTaxi to Tashkent: Two Years with the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan
Rating: 5 / 5