Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival

Biehl's Will to Live takes on the challenging task of examining the institutional forces behind Brazil's lauded HIV/AIDS response while also highlighting the personal stories of some of the individuals most impacted by Brazilian HIV/AIDS policy. By pairing interviews with policymakers and physicians with interviews of Bahia's poorest AIDS patients, Biehl demonstrates the complexity of the state of the epidemic in modern-day Brazil. Biehl's talents as an ethnographer are most apparent in his longitudinal fieldwork at Caasah, a grassroots health service in Salvador, which allows him to track how HIV/AIDS influences the life paths of impoverished AIDS patients. Through his skilled interviewing, Biehl fully captures the life stories of his interviewees - giving a face to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Brazil and fully engaging the reader. Additionally, Biehl examines issues of pharmaceutical governance, the challenges associated with a "magic bullet" approach to health care, and the influence of HIV/AIDS activism on AIDS policies in Brazil. Torben Eskerod's powerful images of those most vulnerable to the disease beautifully complement Biehl's precise yet descriptive prose. This fascinating follow-up to Biehl's first book, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment, winner of the Margaret Meade Award for 2007, leaves the reader considering the kinds of changes that need to be made to worldwide HIV/AIDS programs to make them more successful. Will to Live is an excellent contribution to the academic AIDS/HIV literature and individuals from fields such as global public health, medical anthropology, and social medicine would greatly benefit from wrestling with the arguments presented here.