Seth C. Kalichman

This is as definitive a book as we have so far -- as close to a standard work as exists -- on those who would deny the connection between HIV and AIDS; or that AIDS is a heterosexual as well as a homosexual disease; or that AIDS can be transmitted through sexual contact rather than just through sharing needles or through blood transfusion; or even, in extreme cases, that AIDS exists at all. Then there are those who believe AIDS exists but that it's a man-made bug designed to exterminate gays, or blacks, or prostitutes, or Africans, or . . . Of course, the people who are shouting their denials the loudest, or who're most effective in convincing these groups of their fantasies, are rarely members of these groups themselves: with glaring exceptions like South Africa's ex-President Thabo Mbeki and ex-Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, they're more likely to be comfortably off white American or Australian males in the twilight of their careers. Of course, there are HIV/AIDS denialists to whom this description doesn't apply -- as well as those mentioned, journalist Celia Farber is a prime example -- but an overall characteristic of the denialists that Kalichman frequently stresses is that none of them have done any direct research into AIDS or the HIV retrovirus. While some, like Peter Duesberg, have an extraordinarily distinguished past in some vaguely related field (in Duesberg's case it concerned the genetic basis of cancer), none have actually performed the research that would qualify them to speak authoritatively. They are no more qualified to promulgate their conspiracy theories than are you and I. And those conspiracy theories are costing lives by the thousands, hundreds of thousands, and likely millions. So why do they do it? It's a question Kalichman comes close on occasion to answering, although I suspect it remains, in the very end, as much of a mystery to him as it does to anyone:

Having read a great deal of what the denialists have to say  and having communicated at length with several of them myself, I am left to question how much any of these people actually care about AIDS and those affected by the disease. (p150)

So, if you want to find out about HIV/AIDS denialism, this is definitely the book you should seek out. At the same time, it's one of the most abysmal pieces of publishing I've ever come across -- and I'm including here the stacks of self-published POD books I used to read for review. This book isn't self-published: it was released by the Copernicus imprint of the revered scientific publisher Springer. Yet there can be scarcely a page without half a dozen mechanical errors on it, from typos (right down to the level of reversed quote-marks, where someone has blanket-applied smartquotes but not checked the results), homophone errors (I especially liked the term "ad homonym arguments" [pxv:] and the description of the Rev Jeremiah Wright as Obama's controversial pasture [p108:]), misuse of words (most particularly the word "refute", which Kalichman uses throughout when he means "rebut"), incompleted sentences, or sentences in which subject and verb don't agree . . . The list could go on and on. I'd say the index reads like a parody except it goes beyond that: it's as if it were compiled by a ten-year-old who knew what an index looked like but didn't understand why it was there. I didn't spot-check it for accuracy because almost everything I wanted to look up wasn't listed, including people who play a major part in the text. At times I wondered if the book had been dictated into voice-recognition software, and then somehow the first draft had accidentally been typeset in place of the finished version. Certainly there has been no copy-editing and no proofreading. It's a mess. To repeat, the book was published by Springer.

A further difficulty is that the citation of sources is incomplete. Kalichman admits as much at the outset, saying that he was concerned to make the book readable rather than a text barely discernable through a thicket of glosses; and that's a fair enough argument, I suppose. However, checking up by dint of tedious googling on quite a number of the papers he mentioned but gave no citation for, I discovered that more often than I was comfortable with the paper didn't say quite what Kalichman claimed. I'm pretty certain these discrepancies arose through sloppiness rather than mendacity because they rarely affected his argument (in only one example was his argument strengthened by the error, when he gave a figure for prostitute rates of HIV infection clearly unaware that the research was among male, not female, prostitutes; and in one case his misquotation of a paper actually weakened his argument, where he described "just under 50%" of a group as believing a conspiracy theory when the true figure was 54%). Since one of his complaints about the denialists is that they have a habit of misrepresenting their source material, this unreliability is, to say the least, a bit ironic.

As I say, this is as near as we have to date to a definitive text on the subject, and fundamentally it's a very good piece of work. If you simply want a sort of grand overview of HIV/AIDS denialism, this is definitely the book for you. But I hope fervently that there's a second edition sometime Real Soon Now and that this time Springer's editorial dept does its job and eliminates the myriad footling errors that mar the version currently published.… (lisätietoja)