"Combating AIDS draws upon material on AIDS control in South Africa, Kenya, Brazil, Thailand, Cambodia and India to extract universal lessons for developing countries. Its focus is on communication strategy, but half of the book is devoted to discussing the global history of the epidemic, including its biomedical, clinical, epidemiological and policy dimensions. In these chapters the book is disappointing. The strong chapters are those on cultural strategies and entertainment-education, which draw attention to the limitations of approaches that ignore cultural strengths and the opportunities that they provide for positive intervention. ... [The book] is slickly written using communicators' theories, taking the reader step-by-step through various arguments, and using repetition to ingrain them in the reader's mind. It is likely to interest local programme managers, as it provides examples of a wide range of interventions that comply with the homilies of current AIDS-control thinking."

Link to review in Nature*

*This review also covers Living with the AIDS virus: The Epidemic and the Response in India edited by Samiran Panda, Anindya Chatterjee & Abu S. Abdul-Quader.

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