Witness To AIDS (Autobiography) - Hardcover

Cameron, Edwin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1845111192 ISBN 13: 9781845111199

Publisher: I.B. Tauris, 2005

Synopsis

When Edwin Cameron announced to a stunned local and international media that he – one of South Africa’s most prominent citizens - was himself living with the virus cutting swathes through the population of the continent, the impact was immediate. In Witness to AIDS, Edwin Cameron’s compelling memoir, he grapples with the meaning of HIV/AIDS: for him as he confronts the possibility of his own lingering death, and for all of us in facing up to one of the most desperate challenges of our time. In his intensely personal account of survival, Cameron blends elements of his destitute childhood with his daily duties as a senior judge and international human rights lawyer, while focusing always on the epidemic's central issues : stigma, unjust discrimination, and, most vitally, the life-and-death question of access to treatment. Cameron's remarkable story of his own survival in an epidemic that has cost millions of lives is at once moving and uplifting, sobering and ultimately hopeful.

About this title

About the Author

Edwin Cameron is a justice in South Africa's Constitutional Court, and a former justice in Supreme Court of Appeal. He is an internationally respected human rights lawyer and AIDS activist.

Review

""This book will be a major contribution by a courageous South African towards that quest for a better life for all.""--Nelson Mandela

""If truth is beauty, this relentlessly brilliant and hopeful book is beautiful. It is a text to live by, if we aspire to the possibility of a better life for all...in a world widely threatened by HIV/Aids."" --Nadine Gordimr, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 1991

""Cameron addresses the taboo questions of race, sexual orientation, poverty and stigma in the context of the HIV/Aids epidemic, writing almost always from a personal perspective, but with an unconditional commitment to social justice."" -- Zackie Achmat, internationally renowned activist

""The HIV/AIDS epidemic has produced a few thoughtful and quiet heroes. Judge Edwin Cameron is one of them. His thought-provoking memoir is a breathtakingly beautiful story of our times. Cameron's stunning prose draws us into the heartbreak and the triumph that is AIDS in South Africa, and his honest confrontation with the moral and physical reality of AIDS and its meaning for his own body and the body politic informs our hearts and minds. It is a true privilege to share this gifted and compassionate man's thoughts and insights, his gripping exploration of black/white, positive/negative, gay/straight, stigma and compassion. The fearless gaze he casts into his own soul lifts his story beyond the AIDS epidemic in one place and time and makes it a timeless gift for the spiritual renewal of us all."" --Susan Hunter, Independent Consultant to world health organizations

""Cameron tells a the story of both his own travail and South Africa's wider plight with the kind of admirable honesty that he urges others to adopt.""--Oxford Today, Hilary Issue, 2006

About this edition

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1845111192
• ISBN 13: 9781845111199
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240
• Editor: Sherratt Kate