"Farmer's sensitive exploration of the lives and deaths of the people at [the village of] Do Kay give his study a distinctly human face and an emotional edge.... The book is at the same time fiercely personal and coldly objective. The result is both moving and illuminating." - Science "Farmer renders a richly layered and nuanced ethnographic portrait." - Harvard Educational Review "This superbly crafted volume is dedicated to explaining and refuting a popular U.S. belief that AIDS came to the United States from Haiti.... Farmer has made an outstanding scholarly contribution to the 'anthropology of suffering,' the assessment of illness as perceived and experienced by a patient embedded in an interlocking fabric of culture and history." - Medical Anthropology Quarterly"

Paul Farmer, the Presley Professor at Harvard Medical School, is founding director of Partners In Health and Chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital. Among his books are Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (California, 2003).