Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2020 -

Watkins-Hayes (Northwestern Univ.) provides a powerful work based partly on findings from interviewing over 100 women living with AIDS. The text is mainly an easy read, recounting life stories told by four anonymous Chicago women about their experiences up to and beyond being diagnosed with AIDS. In alternating chapters, the book also provides strategic information that can help all kinds of practitioners involved in community health, drawn from Watkins-Hayes's parallel consultations with prominent AIDS activists and policy experts. Through this combination of patient narrative and expert witness, alert readers will discover new ideas on how to improve communication and general outcomes in clinical and social services settings. One of the interesting patterns to emerge from the "transformative projects" illustrated by these life narratives is the subject's changing self-perception. Each woman moves from "dying from" her illness/condition (framed by Watkins-Hayes as representing "multiple injuries of inequality" including the HIV/AIDS diagnosis itself) to being able to "live with it." This work is intended to galvanize social and political commitment, and thereby help practitioners assist people to survive. As a professional nurse practitioner this reviewer will bring both inspiration and ideas gained from reading this book directly to interactions with HIV+ patients.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.