Product Description

"I have spent the last four years watching people die." With these wrenching words, diplomat and humanitarian Stephen Lewis opens his 2005 CBC Massey Lectures. Lewis's determination to bear witness to the desperate plight of so many in Africa and elsewhere is balanced by his unique, personal, and often searing insider's perspective on our ongoing failure to help. Lewis recounts how, in 2000, the United Nations Millennium Summit in New York introduced eight Millennium Development Goals, which focused on fundamental issues such as education, health, and cutting poverty in half by 2015. In audacious prose, alive with anecdotes ranging from maddening to hilarious to heartbreaking, Lewis shows why and how the international community is falling desperately short of these goals. This edition includes an afterword by Lewis, covering events after the lectures were delivered in fall 2005.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #57581 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-01
• Released on: 2006-06-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .58 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From Amazon
The AIDS pandemic of Africa has killed 19 million people, 4 million of them children. It is the world's worst health disaster since the Middle Ages. The problems are so staggering they seem incomprehensible. But Canadian diplomat Stephen Lewis manages to explain their roots, give them a human face, and outline solutions in his important book Race Against Time. As the United Nations Secretary General's special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, Lewis has an insider's view of the political stonewalling of Western countries as well as the brutal realities of AIDS-ravaged villages in Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Lewis is the son of federal New Democratic Party leader David Lewis and was himself head of the Ontario NDP. He is frank that he has "a love affair with Africa"--first kindled when he was a teacher in Nigeria, Ghana, and Uganda during the early 1960s. After a stint as Canadian Ambassador to the UN, Lewis launched into a new career as an international diplomat, holding top jobs at UNICEF and the World Health Organization. He doesn't hide his fury at Western complicity in Africa's AIDS catastrophe. He says African countries were brought to their knees by World Bank and International Monetary Fund policies that forced many governments to gut health care and social programs in the 1980s. Africa's hamstrung societies were unable to care for their citizens when AIDS struck. "I have spent the last four years watching people die," he writes. "The ongoing plight of Africa forces me to perpetual rage. It's all so unnecessary, so crazy." Lewis's book is passionately written and poignantly brings home the truth that the distant tragedy in Africa is not so distant at all. --Alex Roslin

Review
"...spells out the problems with so much heart that it's hard to finish the book without wanting to seek out some way to get involved." -- Quill and Quire, November, 2005

From the Publisher
*Winner of two CBA Libris Awards for Non-Fiction Book of the Year and Author of the Year.

*Finalist for the Pearson Writer’s Trust Non-Fiction Prize, The Trillium Book Award.

#1 National Bestseller

“I have spent the last four years watching people die.” With these wrenching words, diplomat and humanitarian Stephen Lewis opens his 2005 Massey Lectures. In 2000, the United Nations introduced eight Millennium Development Goals on fundamental issues such as education, health, and cutting poverty in half by 2015. In audacious prose, alive with anecdotes ranging from maddening to hilarious to heartbreaking, Lewis shows why and how the international community is falling desperately short of these goals. He probes the appalling gap between vision and current reality, be he also offers bracingly attainable solutions.

This striking, redesigned second edition contains a new Afterword by Lewis, bringing us up-to-date on important events that have transpired in the months since the lectures were delivered.