Helen Epstein’s book, The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS, makes the New York Times’ list of 100 most notable books of the year. Epstein, a public health specialist and molecular biologist turned journalist, argues that Uganda’s gains against AIDS are attributable to an indigenous African solution (the Ugandan government’s campaign to promote AIDS awareness and monogamy) to an African problem (long-term concurrent relationships). The original Times book review is here. Last month I blogged about John Iliffe’s History of the African Aids Epidemic. Reviewing similar evidence, Iliffe resists the journalistic tendency to find a single compelling answer to an important question, finding Uganda’s success much more mysterious and inconclusive.
Here is a listing of Africa’s Web 2.0 sites
The Boston Review has a special feature entitled “What Helps Poor Countries Grow?â€, with four contributors:
- Inequality matters by Nancy Birdsall
- The future of development theory by Abhijit Banerjee
- Delivering health care in developing countries by Michael Kremer and David Clingingsmith
- The problem of corruption by Ben Olken
Global Voices Online highlights some fantastic short stories (translated) from the Egyptian blogger Ohod, about people he met in his childhood and how life changed them when they grew up.
Also from Global Voices Online, a note about an award-winning Conoglese blogger:
Those who worried about how few African blogs had been nominated will be applauding the jury’s decision to give 2007′s Best Blog in French award to Cédric Kalonji, from the Democratic Republic of Congo. (Here is my description of his blog in a round-up for Global Voices in July: ‘Probably the most consistently interesting Congolese blog is kept by Cédric Kalonji, whose photographs and commentary bear humorous but often sorrowful witness to the struggles of ordinary life in Kinshasa, the country’s heavily populated, run-down capital.’)
On hearing he’d won, Cédric wrote [translated from the French],
“It is a great joy to see my work recognized internationally, and big pride to be able to speak in the name of the great Congo. This recognition gives me even more strength, more energy to pursue this adventure and to go even further.”
Read more here.