Reviews for If A Partner Has AIDS

The average rating for If A Partner Has AIDS based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-07-25 00:00:00 Nicholas Coll A detailed ethnography of 41 individuals, representing 19 families, struggling with diagnoses of various inherited genetic diseases. I was especially interested in the many examples of verbatim conversations between the researchers and the individuals (mostly women), as this gave me a sense of how interviews might be conducted under such conditions. The authors show how families often have very different ideas about the origin of such diseases and how they are passed down; how their lives often become inundated with surveillance techniques - surveilling themselves for symptoms, mothers watching daughters and worried about their future, and daughters watching mothers and perhaps seeing their own future there. Who is told and who isn't provides some surprising information, and is often in direct contradiction to what clinicians believe to be the case. For instance, family groups that aren't in regular contact are often left out of the notification loop "because we don't see them anymore"; elderly family members are often not told as no one wants to "upset them"; and, in the case of families where illnesses have occurred primarily in females there is a disingenuous notion that brothers and sons won't be affected, even when genetic data proves differently. The authors conclude that clinicians should be offered anthropological training "in order to understand the awareness contexts and dynamics of family networks," and to allow them "to engage with the shared and collective narratives of kinship, idioms of relatedness and interpretative frameworks that constitute the social world of the family" (p. 149). Very interesting and enlightening account.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-07-09 00:00:00 Winston Hahne For a person who wants to know about all aspects of cognitive neuroscience and is new to the field, this book is amazingly sufficient; for you can't open a book like Gazzaniga's and read it to the end. It is fluently written, nicely explained, and contains easy to get illustrations and graphs. The best thing about it, is that the author challenges your mind by introducing different modern cognitive models. It also contains stories from our real life that correspond to the cognitive subjects explained! I guess I was lucky I found it in our university's library.