Mobilizing Against AIDS: The Unfinished Story of a Virus, by Eve K. Nichols, 212 pp, with illus, $15, paper $7.95, Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press, 1986.
The proliferation of books dealing with the medical, legal, ethical, and social policy aspects of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) has necessitated scrutiny of the nature, function, and goals of each text. In a rapidly changing field such as AIDS, there must be a careful balancing of the rights and needs of the public to have accurate and timely data and of the dangers of premature and contradictory reporting. As one reviews these texts, one first asks who the intended audience for the book is and, second, what new or useful information is transmitted and for what purpose.AIDS and Patient Management, though wide in scope and ambitious in its undertaking, suffers from a lack of defined audience and from a multiauthored and conference