The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS,   ISBN:9780393337655

Customer Rating: 

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 good. It's well-written, and funny, 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 worst slums in the world.

She doesn't pull any punches. The writing is gritty and genuine. She talks 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 almost 400 pages and I still was left looking for an answer at the end. But maybe there really isn't one.

Highly recommended. I really enjoyed this book.

Customer Rating: 

"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 surveillance 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 began her work life as an Asia-based journalist; and she brings considerable 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 great many bureaucrats in her efforts; also a great 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 subject, they are entertainingly written, to boot. I wouldn't have thought 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 against 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 good, 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, seriously educational, accessible, easy-to read book about AIDS, written by a qualified scientist, no less.

Customer Rating: 

Its rare to find a page turner in this subject 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 country-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 recommended.

Customer Rating: 

Elizabeth Pisani delivers a book that is enjoyable to read, but more importantly, 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 great follow-up to get an idea of what has happened with the AIDS crisis since the 90s, and on an international level. The most interesting 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

Customer Rating: 

I had never read a piece of social research before that was truly a page-turner -- until I read Elizabeth Pisani's wonderful book. This book is not only eminently readable -- for academics and lay readers alike -- but it is also organized and assembled in an intricate fashion that weaves ethnographic accounts of the street realities of HIV transmission among the most vulnerable populations of the developing world, along with the day-to-day efforts of Pisani and her epidemiologist collaborators' efforts to find and study these vulnerable populations, and still manages to lay out logical arguments about HIV transmission and the sanctimonious efforts of U.S. AIDS policy under the Bush (44) Administration. In fact, the flow of the book is so good that readers could almost lose sight of the practical reality that Pisani and her editors actually consciously worked at organizing this text.

I imagine that some in the halls of epidemiological science will take offense at Pisani's graphic street-level depictions and language, and perhaps even the title itself. Those who do will be the poorer for their arrogance. As an academic who teaches field research, I can say candidly that I was inspired by Pisani's depictions, her explanations, and the analytic processes that lie close beneath the surface of what she portrays in her writing. Her critique of the epidemiological research that accounts for HIV by poverty, gendered power relations, and barriers to development rang a coherent bell. She ably demonstrates in graphic depiction the everyday mechanisms by which HIV is transmitted -- unprotected sex and sharing needles among drug users -- even though epidemiologists' models of distant "causes" help to sustain Western do-gooders' attention to the problem. Her work is an inspiration to those of us who believe the nature of the social world is found, not in clean models of "predictor variables," but by getting your hands dirty by finding out how things happen on the street.

Some may be offended by Pisani's title, but it quite accurately captures the spirit of the book. Pisani's message is that if you want to understand AIDS in the developing world, you need to ask those who know most about its transmission: sex workers and drug addicts. Pisani's book succeeds because her research doesn't shy away from the the Third World back alley people with true wisdom about its transmission.