There Is No Me Without You One Woman`s Odyssey to Rescue Africa`s Children [HC,2006]
Categories: Books, Biographies & Memoirs, Arts & Literature

There Is No Me Without You: One Woman's Odyssey to Rescue Africa's Children by Melissa Faye Greene. Bloomsbury Pub Plc USA,2006


Dimensions: 6.41 x 1.56 x 9.54 inches
ISBN-13: 978-1596911161
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1596911166
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Print length: 472 pages
Publication date: September 5, 2006
subtitle: Hardcover – September 5, 2006
author: Visit Amazon's Melissa Fay Greene Page search results Melissa Fay Greene
review: Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Not unlike the AIDS pandemic itself, the odyssey of Haregewoin Teferra, who took in AIDS orphans, began in small stages and grew to irrevocably transform her life from that of "a nice neighborhood lady" to a figure of fame, infamy and ultimate restoration. In telling her story, journalist Greene who had adopted two Ethiopian children before meeting Teferra, juggles political history, medical reportage and personal memoir. While succinctly interspersing a history of Ethiopia, lucidly tracing the history of AIDS from its early manifestation as "slim disease" in the late 1970s to its appearance as a bizarrely aggressive [form] of Kaposi's sarcoma in the early 1980s, and following the complex path of medication (a super highway in the West, a trail in Africa), Greene rescues Teferra from undeserved oblivion as well as rescuing her from undeserved obloquy (false accusations of child selling). As with her previous books ( Praying for Sheetrock ; The Temple Bombing ; Last Man Out ), Greene takes a very close look at what appears to be the fringe of an important social event and illuminates the entire subject. Ethiopia is home to "the second-highest concentration of AIDS orphans in the world"; even as some of the orphans find happy endings in American homes, Greene keeps the urgency of the greater crisis before us in this moving, impassioned narrative. (Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist The horrific numbers behind the AIDS pandemic in Africa, "the most terrible epidemic in human history," have little resonance for most people in the West: "the ridiculous numbers wash over most of us." But this searing account humanizes the statistics through heartbreaking, intimate stories of what it is like for young orphans left alone in Ethiopia. Greene's story focuses on one rescuer, Haregewoin Teferra, who has opened her home and compound in a rickety hillside neighborhood of Addis Ababa and taken in hundreds of the untouchables thrown in the streets and left at her door. She cannot turn them away. Yes, the comparisons with Mother Teresa are there, but this is no hagiography; the middle-aged Teferra is "just an average person with a little more heart." Greene tells the stories in unforgettable vignettes of loss, secrecy, panic, stigma, and, sometimes, hope, even as she documents the big picture of "the human landslide," the history and science of epidemiology and transmission, and expresses her fury at the "crimes against humanity" of the multinational drug companies whose expensive patents have denied millions access to the life-saving medicines. Just as moving are the personal stories of international adoptions in the U. S., including two Ethiopian children taken into Greene's own Atlanta family. The detail of one lost child at a time, who finds love, laughter, comfort, and connection, opens up the universal meaning of family. Hazel Rochman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved About the Author Melissa Fay Greene is the author of No Biking in the House Without a Helmet , Praying for Sheetrock , The Temple Bombing , Last Man Out , and There Is No Me Without You . Two of her books have been finalists for the National Book Award, and New York University's journalism department named Praying for Sheetrock one of the top one hundred works of journalism in the twentieth century. She has written for The New Yorker , The Washington Post , The New York Times Magazine , Atlantic Monthly , Good Housekeeping , Newsweek , Life , Reader's Digest , Redbook , and Salon , among others. She and her husband, Don Samuel, have nine children and live in Atlanta. Read more