Playing Hardball in Government and Politics

Hailed both for its revelations and its intense readability, this extraordinary work of investigative reporting examines the myriad theories about the origin of AIDS — and offers compelling evidence that an experimental polio vaccine administered in Africa in the 1950s led to one of the most devastating infectious diseases in human history.\r\n– The publication will coincide with World AIDS Awareness Day.\r\n– This is a landmark work — the culmination of a decade of research, involving more than 600 interviews and analysis of more than 4,000 scientific texts.\r\n– Readers of Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague, Gina Kolata’s Flu, and Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On will be fascinated by The River.

While science has devoted much of its efforts to finding a cure for AIDS, the sources of this deadly epidemic remain largely unexamined. Distinguished science journalist Edward Hooper presents the meticulously researched — and highly readable — history of HIV and its possible origins. Pursuing leads across the U.S., the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa, Hooper pieces together the tantalizing clues offered by long-archived blood samples, early AIDS-like cases (such as the “Manchester sailor” case of 1959), immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs), and the medical interventions in Africa and elsewhere that may have played a role in SIVs’ crossover into humans.Hooper examines over two dozen theories of origin, and eventually discards most of them. What remains is a remarkable and well-supported theory for the sudden appearance of AIDS, and the definitive story of its lethal spread. Drawing on more than 4,000 sources and 600 interviews, The River is a thorough and provocative investigation into the most terrible epidemic of the twentieth century.

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