The most recommended books about HIV

This is a memoir that has really stayed with me. It is beautifully written and a compulsive read.

Dr. Verghese describes the world of the deep south on the precipice of the AIDS epidemic. It is his story of being a young doctor, but also the story of the explosion in HIV cases far from the coastal cities that were the epicenters of the epidemic. I found myself crying over the cases he described, and feeling his heart-ache as he battled for individuals with HIV to gain acceptance, support, and treatments in their communities. 

The experience in this book of orphaned siblings living in the streets of Lusaka is harrowing. The children’s narration of their experience is told in a matter-of-fact way which makes it more poignant because they have accepted their fate. A recommended read for anyone who likes stories about the dark side of growing up and feels like a good cry. This is because although Chimuka the protagonist is fictional; they are thousands of real Chimuka’s growing up on the streets. 

It takes a great writer to make the complex structure and mechanics of viruses legible, and moreover, deeply compelling.

Osmundson draws together his personal experiences, expertise in microbiology, and a queer politics and studies in eleven essays that reflect critically on how viruses like HIV and COVID-19 (and their intersections) have redefined each of our daily lives.

The book offers powerful insights into illness politics, sex and pleasure amidst pandemics, and our collective responsibility for one another through a very personal narrative in ways that promise crucial insights. We need such personal and critical work as we continue to figure out new ways to live alongside viruses and viral pandemics.

This book made me dizzy with love. This memoir is overflowing with love. Love of the self, love of language, romantic love, familial love, pet love, fear of love, unrequited love, tough love, tender love.

Perhaps most of all, I was taken with the way the author navigates the world so internally, a very solitary yet romantic pursuit of belonging. I kept catching myself leaning forward while reading, propelled through the nonlinear story of Stewart's life by the swelling emotions and incredible control of language.

I spent two weeks reading this book on repeat because the powerful, poetic prose kept inspiring me to write. If this book were a cake, I would eat it forthwith.

Marty Fink’s book is one of the best examples of recent and groundbreaking scholarship on HIV/AIDS.

Fink examines HIV/AIDS histories through critical disability studies discourse to show in a compelling and very readable way how queer and trans people in the 1980s and early 1990s came together to take care of each other when faced with stark and far-reaching state violence.

This book has deep contemporary relevance showing how multifaceted HIV care-giving narratives continue to inform how individuals and our wider society makes sense of gender, disability, and kinship.

Such work is essential in this political moment where we are seeing ever-more challenges to bodily self-determination, for women, queer and, especially for trans people. 

This contemporary YA novel is honest, open-hearted, and rings true to the teenage experience. Simone is HIV positive, a reality that makes sexual relationships complicated and her presence at a new school potentially dangerous, thanks to a series of anonymous notes in her locker threatening to out her. In this debut novel, Camryn Garrett deftly navigates complex subjects while infusing Simone’s story with humor, hope, and all the excitement that accompanies first love.

A big mistake in much radical analysis is to characterize problems in dualistic terms that externalize responsibility from Africa (Rodney, of course, is wide open to that critique). Thus, colonialism is not just irredeemably bad but simple to identify and directly related to white skin. The end of formal colonialism provided new targets in sometimes caricature form: black-skin-white-mask neocolonialism and neoliberalism, notably. Such things undoubtedly exist. However, Kenworthy’s brilliant, gob-smacking analysis of the unintended consequences of life-saving technologies reveals levels of complexity and complicity that belie easy dualisms. How does something that promises liberation from mass suffering and death (anti-retroviral drugs) become a machine to entrench corrupt elites and opportunistic NGOs, to sell cheap textiles in America, and to exploit poor women’s unremunerated care work? Read, weep, and lose your illusions about corporate social responsibility.

This is an amazing book if you want to understand that disease isn’t just medical, it’s also cultural.

Contagious really describes how culture influences how we understand illness and how that affects treatment and care of individuals, including who we blame and how we understand risk.

People like to think of medicine and science as being detached and objective, but this book shows that simply isn’t true. 

This is the behind-the-scenes account of the most-watched NCAA Final in television history, and the epic Celtic-Laker clashes of the 1980s. MacMullan had ultimate access and knows the game. In this work, she captures the voices of Magic and Larry throughout giving the reader primary source history on a golden time in the NBA. 

I met Karen Gedney while traveling in Mexico. She started to tell me stories about her time as a physician at a male prison in Nevada, then gave me a copy of her memoir. Once I started the book, I couldn’t put it down.

The world inside a prison is one I know nothing about. After reading her recollections of inmates, bureaucracy, successes, and terrifying encounters, I have a far better sense of this very different world.

Her bravery and candor made this a totally compelling read.