SURVIVING AIDS, by Michael Callen (HarperPerennial:...

SURVIVING AIDS, by Michael Callen (HarperPerennial: $10, illustrated). A noted AIDS activist, Michael Callen, has really written two books: a series of profiles of individuals who have lived more than five years after being diagnosed as having AIDS, and a mordant critique of the attitudes, treatment and media coverage of the disease in America. The interviews with the long-term survivors present warm, informal portraits of people who have managed to resist the pernicious infection. Significantly, Callen fails to find any single clue on how to live with AIDS: Each person describes an individual regimen of medication, therapy, nutrition--and luck. In other chapters, he lambastes the medical establishment and the media for their failure to focus on the 3-to-10% (estimates vary) of AIDS patients who live five years or longer. Callen stresses empowerment in his approach to the disease: He helped to replace the term “AIDS victims” with PWA (People With AIDS). However, at times he seems lost in his own polemics. He discounts HIV as the cause of AIDS and substitutes the medically inadequate theory that his own immune system simply collapsed after combating a multitude of sexually transmitted diseases. His discussions of certain alternate therapies suggest that he doesn’t really understand the staggering complexity of the human organism and how many co-factors could affect an individual’s resistance to a disease. A challenging and valuable book, but not a definitive one.